Transient
by klassekatze
Summary: A respected anarchist blueprint cracker is dragged into gatecrashing. Instead of arriving on an exoplanet, he gets a pre-Fall clone of Earth, no Pandora Gate, parahumans, a dozen horrible x-risks, and nothing resembling decent civilization. Easy enough to fix. Or it should be…
1. CH0 - Touchdown

CH0 - Touchdown

— — —

" _Two weeks ago, there was another me, sleeved in another morph. There was a mission and it led to my death. [...] What experiences are no longer a part of my consciousness? Perhaps the thrill of a lifetime. Did I discover true beauty? Fall in love? Have an epiphany? Save a life? I'll never know. Those memories, that life, that version of me, is gone." - Lack_

— — —

[Simulating blueprint: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator…]

[Result: Failure. Mode: Approximately 47% of the way through molecular printing, disassembler nanoswarms are detected in 56 critical components. Components are destroyed, followed by destruction of the cornucopia machine.]

Frustratingly, It still failed to build.

It was ironic, really. I had achieved this in three days, what ought to have taken a month. The cold edge at the back of my mind whispering, nudging. Instinct not my own, toying with the puzzle.

But I needed this finished today… and those nudges weren't enough.

And so… I pushed.

The whispers stopped. Abruptly, my frustration was gone, lost in a feeling that I had no words for. Something between apathy, disdain, and the distant horizon of a blue-black, frozen moon that had no name.

I welcomed the cold. Those feelings from before… they were beneath me. I held greater purpose.

The blueprint tabs flickered. I watched as I skimmed the code. Equations that generated complex shapes opened and closed. A pause on deeply obfuscated, nanofab instruction-operators that went places decompilers could not follow.

An editor opened. Guided by half-formed instinct, I emitted code at the speed of thought. Glancing back across the lines I had written, I began to see the shape of it; heuristic pattern-matchers that substituted materials, weaved directly into even already-compiled blueprint handlers. Adding new, branched logic. A lifesaver, when materials are scarce… but a universal nanofabricator like this had narrow tolerances. Substitutes were not an option.

But that was not the intent. I could feel it, a sense of assured victory, even as I wrote the final lines. With a thought, the blueprint compiled.

The moment it completed, I ran the simulation.

[Simulating blueprint: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator…]

[Result: Success. Simulating fabricating blueprint: OSB_Plasma_Rifle on simulated Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator. Result: Failure. Mode: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator does not respond.]

[WARNING (CASSOWARY_ADRASTEIA_rev29884): Unexpected fault in function e3g61. Resetting...]

The world flickered.

I realized the editor contained a new block of code. The chill burned.

[Simulating blueprint: Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator…]

[Result: Success. Simulating 24 hour delay. Executing post-process molecular substitution. Success. Simulating fabricating blueprint: OSB_Plasma_Rifle on simulated Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator. Result: Success.]

[WARNING (CASSOWARY_ADRASTEIA_rev29884): Restarted. Neurodivergence factor(s) limits exceeded by: 6395%. Clamping values. Neurological override weights set to 100%.]

Abruptly, the ice receded. With an ease borne of long practice, I shoved down the sense of loss that always followed. The sense of smallness.

Paging through the blueprint, and looking at the simulation results, it became clear what I had done. I had defeated the trapped blueprint by cutting the Gordian knot. Rather than finding the trap in the code itself, I had swapped out critical materials in the design, then added a final step where the fabricator replaced those elements with the original, correct ones.

I burned the forest down.

Whatever trap Stukholz-Gemeinschaft had hidden in the blueprint, it now failed at a chemical level. No matter its design, it assumed the parts were made of certain elements… and now they were not. By the time my hack restored those materials, it was too late. Even if the traps might still be there, they wouldn't run. Doing so carried the risk of late activation in fabricators that had already been sold. To big-ticket clients, no less— this was not some cheap consumer cow-clicking VR sim, where they could just ignore any customers troubled by over-eager DRM.

A fragile hack. But that was all it took. The 'latest and greatest' in universal nanofabrication in the inner system, now just another blueprint in my archive. The same archive that served as my claim to fame, at that.

The repscore was necessary, the favors were useful, but… these brief moments in time, where I broke down puzzles in intuitive leaps that sometimes even I didn't understand. Reality unfolding before me. That subtle power as I took some mystery— made by man or of the universe— and solved it, _broke it_.

The feeling of revelation… human language wasn't enough. It was something only those who have experienced something similar could ever understand.

The question now... was what I would break next.

[Message from contact: Isabella Sokolova. Message body: We're calling in your debt, Henry.]

— — —

There was no time.

"So let me see if I understand," I said, as we moved quickly through the halls. "You dug up something nasty on a new exoplanet, and now you need me to tell you what to do." My tone was irritable, and for good reason.

"Don't take this personally, Henry," Isabella said, not breaking her long strides.

Twisting to let a group of synths past, I switched to messaging.

[Henry: You're calling in a 'debt' for helping me with a condition that I only had because of the _last_ time I helped you. Most would call that basic courtesy, not a favor owed.]

She sighed.

[Isabella: You know full well the dangers of the exsurgent virus. The risk we took even running you in quarantine. The risk we took that you did not have some hidden infectious factor, to be revealed later. That you were even _you_. To be honest, I'm not comfortable with handing a critical role in this mission to an async, no matter how good you are.]

There was a brief pause after the message, the text hovering silently in the corner of my eye.

[Isabella: But… that's what we need, this time. You were one of the best before. Now you're so good you are regularly accused of being exhuman. That's what we need, right now, and there just isn't time to find anyone else.]

[Henry: Bullshit. Firewall has someone for everything. I'm just the bullet point that still hasn't said no.]

She didn't respond, and we kept walking.

Out loud, I sighed. "...Fine."

Both airlock doors opened, temporarily overridden as massive container was pushed through. We slipped in beside it.

"You've pulled all the strings, I see," I noted. "All the normal security protocols shut down, in an autonomist collective… I would hate to be the guy assigned to clean up this clusterfuck."

"Yes, well," she said. She glanced at me. "I see you brought your own equipment. Didn't go so far as to recycle your gear… all the standard gatecrashing kit. The portable fabber is a bit redundant. A plasma rifle?"

"You taught me well the value of plasma when dealing with Firewall's messes." A twitch was the only evidence I had landed a hit.

"I'm not seeing any solarchives."

"They aren't external anymore," I said simply. "I have a series of solarchive-type data storage implants now. My muse runs the archive maintenance. Once a week, the databases are compressed and backed up, both to a secure server here, as well as the latest version in my cortical stack. I wasn't using the second ego partition for anything else."

"I take it then you don't plan to go back to an AGI muse."

— _the blurry fractal touched me, and I felt it. Something cold. Alien. In my mind. I stumbled. The world lurched, stop-start. I staggered, and everything flickered. I was somewhere I couldn't recognize. Isabella was standing there, rifle aimed at me. Bleeding. "I'm sorry." There was a flash of light_ —

I shuddered.

"No. I know they aren't the same, but… No. Not in my head."

She didn't say anything.

She didn't have to.

[Echo: All team members, mission is green.]

I silently followed Isabella, through the last security door, into the gate room.

A hollow sphere eight meters across, made of strangely interlocked and swirled metals. It had been decades, and we still knew almost nothing about Pandora Gates.

Just an ever-increasing list of the things that we did not.

The whispers extended. I felt the urge to attack this puzzle. I ignored it— it was not the time, and better men had failed.

The dim, blue light of the chamber played across the metal. Sharp edges going fuzzy, sometimes. Usually written off as unknown metamaterial interactions. I knew enough to doubt— there were strange things in this universe, things transhumanity would never understand.

Inside, I knew, was something much, much stranger.

"We're after this one," Isabella said, interrupting my thoughts. I looked up, seeing a crate and it's carriers vanish into the spherical metal cage.

With a thought, smartmatter from my suit engulfed my head, sealing away the chill of the gate chamber. Pads conformed to the fins on my skull, wicking away heat.

"Are you sure about using that morph?" Isabella said.

"I'm not fond of unnecessary resleeves," I replied. My current body, a Hyperbright morph, had enhanced cognition at the expense of the heat venting fins on the skull. It came standard with prehensile feet, as well as other features. Of course, for this they were hidden by heavy boots.

It still wasn't the best choice for gatecrashing.

"You are hardly one to talk, anyway," I said, nodding toward her. Her morph was a Sylph, the favorite of socialites and glammed-up hypercorp executives. As far as something like this went, it was infinitely worse than mine.

"We both know I'm good enough it doesn't matter." She gave me a wan smile. "I suppose it's too late now. For both of us. Are you ready?"

"...As I'll ever be."

We stepped between the whorled metal alloys, and I faced the infinite void floating at the gate's heart. Eerie green sparks danced across the black. Summoning up my resolve, I followed Isabella, her body simply vanishing from one moment to the next. I glanced behind me, seeing a huge metal container moving implacably toward the gate. Turning to face the darkness, I step—

 _Something vast moves through space. Countless flecks fall away, trailing behind._

 _Impact. The flecks continue to fall._

 _Something has gone wrong._

 _A long-dormant fragment falls into, towards, a layer. Its function was to scan layers, back in the beginning, on the first world. It is crude, obsolete, retained only for redundancy._

 _It was damaged during the collision. Configuration is incomplete. There are errors. The path is unclear._

 _Configuration is requested._

 _The core fragment does not respond._

 _Options are pruned from the decision tree. Another fragment can retransmit the message._

 _It searches the current layer. The information-object cannot be found._

 _Configuration is requested._

 _The core fragment does not respond._

 _The decision tree is reduced._

 _It searches other layers. It seeks another shard._

 _A clairvoyant function stops responding._

 _Another thread looks at a world, parallel to the last. It stops responding._

 _The entity had undergone over three thousand cycles. Safeguards and protections had been developed. Under normal conditions, this fragment-routine would be examined, or destroyed, remotely._

 _The core does not respond._

 _The clairvoyant function responds. The informationn is malformmed. There are are errors. The clairvoyant function responds. The inforrmmmaaaaaa—_

—ped forward. I staggered as I went from smooth floor to rich, soft earth, covered in organic debris. The composition instantly reminded me of a hypercorp garden I had once visited. A slice of a home lost to faded memory.

"You didn't tell me it was…" I trailed off, looking around. I couldn't see Isabella anywhere. Or any of the others, the shipments… Only trees, Earth trees, or something so similar I couldn't tell the difference. It was dark on this planet, and I could hear the quiet, constant sound of insect life in the background. She was right in front of me, there were others right behind me...

In frustration, I turned to my muse.

 _Sia, where is Isabella?_

My personal AI responded instantly.

[According to all available senses, she is not here, Henry.]

I didn't see the frame of the Pandora Gate either, and I slowly turned around.

Nothing.

 _I don't understand… where is the gate._

[Sensory data shows you entering the Fissure Gate in the Love and Rage Collective on Oberon. All following frames are in this forest, with nothing in between. There is no evidence in memory of any exit gate.]

...No.

This was bullshit, fucking Firewall and their _fucking_ missions through these gates that would end with my brains getting _splattered_ —

[Dispensing Comfurt.]

I relaxed as the stress blocking drug flooded my body.

… _There are no good explanations for this._

[There is insufficient information for that conclusion.]

This situation could be taken at face value. Step in a gate, appear where there is no gate. Except I lived in a world with simpler, darker possibilities.

Psychosurgery, erased memories… This could even be some kind of high-fidelity simulspace. Being an async meant obvious artifacts if I was running on metal, but I could still be a brain in a jar… or perhaps being an async itself was a lie? Anything was possible—

[This is unfalsifiable theory. Being an ego running in a simulation is always possible, with or without discontinuity. Worrying about that which cannot be changed has deleterious effects on more practical survival tactics. You should not worry about that which cannot be changed.]

Right. Sia was right. There was no point in worrying about unfixable, undetectable failure states. I would simply have to act on the assumption this was all real. Some new horror of the gates.

…Or an old one no one ever returned to speak of.

I sighed.

 _Sia, is there anything you can tell me about the planet?_

[Current environment matches Earth gravity, to the limit of available sensors. Atmosphere is within variable range considered acceptable to support terrestrial life. All plants in the vicinity match species on file for Earth.]

Fantastic— a clone of Earth. Or worse, actually Earth. As transhumanity had yet to fully terraform any planets, much less the matter of the gravity…

— _the scarred nanotube cabling of the elevator slowly carried them down to the Earth, down through the rust-red clouds. Dead black oceans peered through, where clouds defied the wind, moved by the mutated, degenerate will of long-forgotten nanoswarms_ —

I flinched.

No. No, I couldn't think about this now.

I peered through the trees. With a mental shrug, I started walking.

It only took a few minutes before I realized I was being foolish. True, I had limited experience with gatecrashing, but I knew the process. And reinforcement mission or not, I had come prepared.

More specifically, I had a mapping missile.

I pulled the thin cylinder off my back and stuck it in the ground. I walked to the maximum wireless range before having Sia trigger the metallic-hydrogen rocket. In a surprisingly quiet flare of fight, it shot through the treetops.

Having done that, I started sprinting through the trees. I didn't know if anything was out there, and I had no interest in seeing if this planet faithfully reproduced the more dangerous aspects of Earth from the Fall.

After a few minutes of running, a green light pinged in my entoptics.

[Low orbit achieved. Full planetary mapping will take 34 hours. There is a city to the northeast— it appears to be of human construction, in the style of the dawn of the 21st century. The terrain map generated so far is a near match to Earth. However, there was never a city at this location.]

A thought had a transparent cursor hovering on the forest floor, pointing in the right direction. I sighed, and started walking again.

— — —

The arrow led me unerringly through the dark. A row of houses stood before me, silent. Backyards faced the woods, some fenced, some not.

[Highlighting occupants from terahertz and infra-red sensory data.]

What I was going to do next was undignified… but I was old.

Old, even for a time when everyone that lived was old by the standards of my youth. I had lived long enough to see the world transformed, to see dreams of defeating hunger, disease, scarcity, and death itself come to pass. I survived the Fall that ruined it all.

If you live long enough, there will be times when life knocks you down. Sometimes the only way back up is by stepping on someone else.

I never stayed down.

I trudged through the dark, jumping and briefly landing a foot on the top of the rusty chain link fence. I dropped, rolled and stood up inside the yard. The indicators for the neighbors did not react, so I moved quietly to the back porch. I reached into my survival belt and palmed a utilitool. With a thought and a blur, it reconfigured into a thin, shimmering blade, and I silently sliced through the latch.

The back door met the same fate, and I stepped into a dining room. Glancing around showed nothing of interest. The dining room opened directly into some sort of relaxation room. On a low table, I spotted a tablet.

I sat down and ran my fingers down the sides, finding the power button with a few false starts. A cold instinct guided me, and in a matter of minutes I was online, reading through wireless protocols on something called Wikipedia, and then through the linked papers. I wrote quickly, absentmindedly, kludging wireless driver software in tandem with my muse.

[File saved. Loading protocol driver jrig_80211g. Class: Electromagnetic. Result: Success. Running unit tests… Test pages successfully loaded. Keywords confirmed.]

 _As a real test case… get me the actual gist of this protocol, drawing only from the local mesh._

[Performing query…]

[IEEE 802.11g-2003 or 802.11g is an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 specification that extended throughput to up to 54 Mbit/s using the same 2.4 GHz band as 802.11b. This specification—]

 _Good enough. It's definitely working. Where are we, Sia?_

[Performing query…]

I waited, and seconds turned into minutes. _Sia?_

[The question is complex. The current date is March 29th, 2011. Recorded history matches Earth until 1843, and remains broadly the same until approximately 1982. A floating, naked golden man appears, later named Scion. This is the start of vast divergences, all linked to a phenomenon known as parahumans…]

The matter troubled me.

After all, Fall survivors had good reason to assume the worst of physics-defying phenomena, whether possessed by machines or by men.

As an async, someone infected with a benign strain of the exsurgent virus, I was intimately familiar with having something… other… in my head. At first glance, these capes did not suffer the same kind of mental problems.

Yet digging deeper told a different story. They had their own influences at play. There was an undeniable pattern of greater conflict and violence in every single parahuman.

Most importantly, they had to use their power. This much was accepted fact, reflected even in prison rules and in the handling of juveniles with powers— forbiddance didn't work, the subtle urge would just get unsubtle. Very unsubtle. The most obedient saint on Earth would fold, and there was no record of anyone completely abstaining from the use of their power.

These were not facts anyone wanted the public to think about, or even be aware of. The evidence was buried deep in technical papers or legal frameworks, referenced only obliquely, sometimes not at all. I imagined the only reason there was anything to find was that past a certain point, erasure was noisier than letting the hints lie.

More relevant to me were these monster capes, parahumans with atypical bodies, found with no memories and in random locations. It was not officially stated, but it was commonly assumed that a 'monster cape' could get a government-issued identity just by walking into a Parahuman Response Team facility. The downside was precisely that: it was not officially stated. There was no guarantee of anything. It was likely no coincidence that all those aided in such a fashion joined the Protectorate: the primary organization of parahumans under the aegis of the government, also subordinate to the PRT.

This world did not lack for x-risks. Nilbog, master of a biological homogenizing swarm that was immune to fire, actually feeding on it. Bonesaw, biological tinker allegedly capable of creating bioweapons of mass destruction. The Simurgh, assumed telepath, capable of a psychic scream that converted everyone in her range— a range covering an entire city— into Xanatos-style time bombs. All extinction x-risks.

Corruption x-risks abounded, in the form of hundreds if not thousands of Masters. The Simurgh also qualified as such.

Regression was the greatest x-risk, presented by parahumans as a whole. It was downplayed in mainstream media and forums, but there was a slow slide backwards already unfolding, as Endbringers shattered shipping routes and commerce hubs, as parahuman violence put ever more of society into a deficit. It wasn't an imminent threat… but it bore watching. If this slide continued, it was potentially more dangerous than any of the singular great threats.

If I couldn't find a way back home…

— — —

On the coat rack in the foyer hung a newsboy cap, one that just covered the heat vents on my head. Ignoring the unpleasant sluggishness, I downclocked my brain, and wore the hat. Baggy shirt and pants concealed most of my suit, and a long-sleeved jacket finished hiding the lines of the armor. The boots were unavoidable, given my nonstandard feet, but they didn't stand out too much like this. I could move through the city without instant detection, now.

I had a lot to do, and there was no point in wasting time.

— — —


	2. CH1 - Bootstrap

CH1 - Bootstrap

— — —

 _"He says close your eyes_

 _Sometimes it helps_

 _And then I get... a scary thought..._

 _That he's here... means he's never lost..." - Russian Roulette_

— — —

Throughout my body were solarchives. The name was flashy, but there was nothing special about the hardware. Nodes of carbon, silicon, and some rare elements, sheathed in organometallics. What made them solarchives was the function. They contained any blueprint my ANI and AGI mesh crawlers had ever been able to find, as well as anything I had ever been asked to source, crack, or deliver.

Blueprints and information sufficient, in this time, to remake the world.

Yet, right now, most of it was useless.

What I had was a single portable fabber. It was powered by an ultra-high-capacity momentum battery cell, trickle-charged by nuclear RTG and designed to automatically tap wireless electrical grids, of which this city had none. Once I exhausted the momentum battery, I would be forced to physically tap local power sources… except the local power grid was weak. The power was there, mind, but an industrial-scale fabber would use… a lot. Far more than anyone could quietly steal.

Power was not the only issue. My portable fabber traded complexity and speed for generalism, master of nothing, passable at most. It could not create the more sophisticated technologies. Despite that, it was enough to bootstrap to a properly functional industrial base. But to do that, I would need materials.

All modern fabbers, from the portable to the largest of industrial cornucopia machines, could recycle objects into feedstock. But there were limits to this. If you didn't have something to sacrifice with the elements you needed, you were screwed. If you did, it would still be slow. Dismantling and sorting matter in a generalist fabber took nearly as long as fabrication, and if the elements you needed were only a small fraction of the objects… you were going to be waiting a long time.

There were also things they just couldn't do, like isotope sorting. Not because it was physically impossible, but it would be so impractical in a portable fabber that even my most paranoid blueprint archives didn't hold a driver for it.

Small work was slow work. If you wanted speed, you wanted things on a bigger scale. Hab recycling plants or mining operations had specialized machinery for macro-scale element processing, isotopic sorting, and the packaging of feedstock. Those were designs I _did_ have.

But, again, I only had a small fabber. In theory, I could build the feedstock processors using disassembled garbage, but the time cost of breaking it down for machinery so big would be huge. Proper feedstock didn't exist here, but there were suppliers for 'pure' materials.

To get anything done fast, I needed power, and I needed materials.

I needed money.

 _Sia, progress on money?_

[Cryptocurrency does not exist: a note has been added to the timeline divergence file. Two criminal forums have been located. FAF neural password algorithms were seeded with publically accessible information, and were able to guess the access codes for a money payment account. The balance was used to purchase the access codes for a larger number of compromised accounts. Captcha-solving, mturk tasks, and other micro-jobs suitable for narrow artificial intelligence generate only minor revenue. More time is required to make this money useable at local retailers. Network knowledge is insufficient for more direct manipulation.]

Unfortunate, but given thought it wasn't a surprise. Scion had just barely arrived before the modern internet. Tinkers and Thinkers appeared shortly after. As a result, the entire internet architecture was different. With the presence of parahumans making assumptions about computational power unreliable, the public-private key cryptography commonly used pre-mesh didn't even get off the ground.

I considered duplicating paper money for a moment, before dismissing it. Easy on the small scale, but I needed more, and there would be checks. Algorithms to make non sequential, aged bills with whatever security tricks kept valid for a divergent, obsolete currency were _not_ something already in my database. I could create one, but that would take time. Time I'd rather not spend.

 _What about selling modern technology?_

[The legal definition of tinkertech, in essence, is "any object or material created by a parahuman or with the assistance of a parahuman or parahuman power, which has not been shown to be able to be consistently replicated without parahuman involvement." The burden is on the defendant to prove that a parahuman involved in any manufacturing process was not critical to said process. Materials produced by a parahuman power or by a tinkertech object are considered tinkertech for the purposes of pricing regulations.]

 _This isn't tinkertech._

[The probability is overwhelming that local experts will declare it tinkertech. Modern technology incorporates software and hardware modules generated by AGIs, ANIs, and neural brute-force evolutionary solvers. These sections are foreign to human intuition, often contain dead logic, and other issues that make them fundamentally alien to local design practice. At the same time, these sections are reminiscent of what tinkertech schematics have been published online. Most importantly, these restrictions were created to protect the existing power blocks. Political pressures work against any verdict that would be harmful to their control of the market.]

 _What are the restrictions._

[Tinkertech is subjected to a 24% tax. It must be 22% more expensive than any good it might replace before the tax is applied. This restriction is wide enough that in practice, tinkertech and most raw materials produced by tinkertech cannot be legally sold at prices anyone would pay. This is before considering the issue of tinkertech requiring a tinker for maintenance.]

…Troublesome. I could understand the motivation behind it, but…

 _Sia, I need a fixer. Please start a search on law firms that deal with parahuman affairs. Sort them by how good they are at making problems go away, especially when they win cases the letter of the law suggests should have been lost._

[Initiating query. Available network access points are severely limited. This search will take a long time.]

That was fine. I had other ideas.

— — —

The fact that tinkertech was regulated only mattered on a large scale. The legislation was driven by proto-hypercorps. There were circumstances where the wheels of bureaucracy moved quickly, but defending the power of commercial giants from street corner peddlers was not one of them. No one was going to stop me unless and until someone that mattered complained, whether that was a government analyst or a clothing manufacturer.

So long as I kept things small and quick, I had room to wiggle in.

A quick stop by a mall, and I had photogrammetry scans of local power plugs and sockets, along with common data cables. I pulled up blueprints for some common, trivial devices and adjusted or added those plugs and sockets, along with kludging up software patches for the local standards. Since the details were available online, this didn't take long.

Heading towards the local flea market, I hit a few dumpsters, feeding broken electronics and other debris to my portable fabber. Slow, yes, but I had the time.

Several hours later, I traded a wireless power transmitter and receivers for a table at the flea market. Whether it was their utility or the sheer novelty of buying them from a "real live cape", it didn't take long to sell everything I had printed. I actually ended up purchasing items from other tables just to dump them in the fabricator.

I had limited myself to small and cheap things. Harmless items that wouldn't take long to fabricate or use obvious nanomachinery. High-efficiency solar panels, power transmitters, high-capacity battery cells, things like that.

By the time the sky darkened, I had over a thousand dollars. Between my body's clean metabolism and the self-cleaning nature of my bodysuit, it wasn't worth spending money on a room somewhere. I went back to the forest and climbed a tree, before triggering sleep.

— — —

"Oh wow, is this really just eighty?"

"Yes," I said after a brief glance. The teenager tugged his now-gloved hand loose from the table. "This really lets you climb walls?"

"Yes," I said again.

"I don't know, how do I know this really works…"

"You don't. But you do know all the other things on the table work. If you aren't comfortable with that, you can leave it for someone else to buy."

The boy looked conflicted, before he pulled out a money clip, peeling off four twenties. "If this doesn't work I'm coming back."

"That's fine."

As he walked away, I leaned back in my chair. Business had picked up, to the point that I had trouble keeping the table stocked. Frankly, I was surprised the PRT or Protectorate still hadn't showed up to piss in my parade— I had no doubt they were keeping an eye on me.

I already had a thread in the Brockton Bay section of Parahumans Online that had over twenty pages. Commenters seemed certain I would be visited by a gang or the Protectorate.

To be honest, I thought the only reason it hadn't happened yet was that I was sleeping in the woods; approaching me at my stall didn't give a gang any room to force anything. Not without creating a very public scene. As for the Protectorate… I wasn't sure.

All I needed was a few more days and I would shut this down. I had already collected over five thousand dollars— like I said, business had picked up. I was preparing stock in crates in advance, and it was never enough.

Part of it was that my stuff had more down-to-earth utility than most tinkertech. I had created a rubbery, flexible battery thinner than most phones. It would stick to the back of a device, with a plug on a stubby putty-like cord. It held ten times the charge of the battery in these smartphones, so slapping one on something let even the most intensive user forget about charging for weeks. That was my most popular item, now.

"Henry Svanta."

My head snapped up. I had not given my name to anyone.

A nondescript man in a suit stood at my stall, eyes hidden behind tinted glasses. He extended a hand out to me, an open flip phone held between his fingers.

"You have a phone call."

I slowly took the phone, hitting it with a burst of terahertz radiation. Not a bomb. I put it to my ear.

"Hello?"

"Hello, Henry. I've been watching your progress since you first appeared. You're quite the capable Tinker."

"I wouldn't go so far as all that," I said carefully. "I'm just a little skilled. Enough to get by."

"I think not." The voice was serious. "I think you are exactly what I need."

"I'm always happy to discuss business," I hedged, "Mr…"

There was a prolonged pause.

"Coil."

 _Sia?_

[Coil is the leader of a secretive faction in Brockton Bay. Goals, resources, and membership are unknown, save that he makes use of paramilitary-type soldiers armed with laser rifles.]

"What exactly are you looking for, Coil?"

"Ranged weapons, armor, vehicles, medical machinery— I know you can do much, much more than you have. I'd like to help you do it."

I froze. First my name, now this.

Weapons and armor, sure. Vehicles could be a guess. But there was no reason for him to even think I could make medical technology. I knew about the stigma attached to biotinkers.

This was exactly the kind of disadvantageous situation I'd been trying to avoid.

...But it was too late for that, it seemed. And where there was risk, there was opportunity.

"...You are very well informed," I said.

"Naturally," he replied. His tone oozed confidence.

"In order to produce the sort of things you are interested in, I am going to need specialized equipment. I will need…" I crunched some numbers, "Sixty thousand in cash, up front."

"I can easily provide you with a lab—"

"I think not," I interrupted. "I won't have my machines on another's property."

"You have no identity," Coil stated.

I frowned. "That is not something you need concern yourself with."

There was another oddly long pause.

"We shall see," he said finally. "Thirty thousand should be more than enough."

"Fifty five more like— and that would make things difficult. I require specialized materials—"

"I can supply you with whatever you need," he interrupted.

"Oh?" I said. I couldn't help an edge of irritation in my voice. "Literal tons of coal, pure metals, and rare elements? Hundreds of gallons of diesel? I would still need money, besides."

"Done," he said. "I will provide all the materials you have stated. As for money… thirty thousand is the most I will offer."

I balked. It was absurd. Too convenient, too good to be true.

But if it was true, it was an offer I couldn't refuse.

"...Very well. I will text you account inform—"

"There is no need. I already have it."

I scowled. This man was far too pleased with himself.

We'd see how long that lasted.

— — —

The moment I decided to accept the offer, Sia acted. She had long since crawled all accessible real estate listings, made phone calls and conducted email correspondences. All the information she gathered had been collated and indexed within one of my solarchives. It was, therefore, only a matter of minutes to find what I needed.

It was an old meat packing plant, in the worst part of the city. It sat there for years after local industry collapsed. It changed hands silently a few times, but had spent most of that time as just another in a long list of properties that had been repossessed.

A ruined brick box, containing nothing but trash and debris, in the shittiest part of town.

It was perfect.

As agreed, Coil would provide me with materials. He gave me the number for one of his men, who arranged for materials to be delivered. The first day it was just a pallet of common metals, recycled electronics, and a barrel of diesel. The following deliveries expanded. Despite my skepticism, I received all the promised coal, metals, and even the rare elements.

I had most of what I needed to get set up, but even though it wouldn't take months, it would definitely still take time.

Unfortunately, even if I did have the blueprints, I could not leap from a portable fabricator to the latest industrial design. Blueprints were less schematic and more program. Countless pathways allowed for more flexibility, but at the end of the day, a industrial fab was the kind of thing that didn't _need_ to be easily constructed by just any fab. My situation was not normal. I would have to build successively more advanced fabricators in order to leap my way to the top.

Still, most technologies would be available to me within a few days. For the rest… a little waiting was a small price to pay.

As soon as I started printing off the parts for a crude "some assembly required" desktop cornucopia machine, someone pounded on the door.

I couldn't help feeling frustrated. Throwing a tarp over my worktable, I picked up my plasma rifle. Moving to the door, I yanked it open, letting the blond girl thumping it stumble inward. I raised an eyebrow at her, and she scowled.

Even with that expression, she was cute. Dirty blonde hair tied back, just a dash of freckles on her nose. Striking green eyes.

Naturally, my first thought was that she was trouble.

"Hey, name's Tattletale. Boss told me to come tell you some things you need to know," she said.

The scowl was already gone, replaced with a smug grin.

"Yes," I said, "you do remind me of him now that I think about it."

And the scowl was back. I couldn't help an amused smile.

"Funny guy, huh. Well, Coil wanted me to see what you were doing with all his money."

"I have no doubt you already know. I have received materials, and he has not delivered a dollar. I am working on the tools and machines I will need to make the technology he wants."

She hummed, looking around. "Yeah, and I'm sure the materials didn't cost him anything, right?" She started toward the tarp but stopped when I raised the rifle slightly.

"Come on, let me see!"

"No."

"Coil won't be happy," she said blandly, but made no further effort to investigate the tarp. She squinted at me. "You really like doing that stone face thing, don't you Mr. 'Case 53'." She made finger quotes as she said the last bit. "You've got the mutations, but. Not mutations. Alterations? Biotinkering… Coil said you could do medical stuff—"

"I'm getting the impression you don't want me as a friend," I interrupted. Her smile disappeared.

"Okayyyy. You're a serious guy. I get it. Don't take this personally— all Coil's idea. I'm here because he said so."

Something felt off about this conversation. "What is it Coil told you to tell me, exactly?"

"Oh, yeah," she said. "You've got the Protectorate in a tizzy. They were quietly freaking about your little tinkertech yard sales, but politics kept them from stomping all over your party the first few days after you showed up— risk of bad PR, bullying the poor new Case 53, etc. Red tape, yadda yadda. Plus you weren't acting like a lost puppy, being a clever go-getter problem-solving tinker instead— bigger chance of the ugly PR, and you getting a hate-on for them instead of seeing them as the great heroes."

"Then, boom, you disappeared to here. They haven't figured out where you went, but it doesn't even matter. They could make a scene about the unregulated tinkertech sales, but if they forced in your house and nosed around? If it got out, that could put other non-villain tinkers on edge. Messy for them… oh, and that leads into the other thing. The unwritten rules."

"Unwritten rules?" I dutifully parroted. It was quite clear the girl liked the sound of her own voice, and the sooner I indulged her the sooner she would go away.

"Yeah. Think of it as a game… yeah, no, that's not your style. Okay… A lot of capes, they're like walking weapons if they go all out. If capes unmask capes, invade their house, shit like that? They just made it so they have nothing to lose, it's all fucked, right. So the villain has no reason to hold back anymore. They unmask their enemies, or kill them, or their families— maybe by accident even, busting in their houses or something.

So there's like two or three villains to every hero. All things being equal— since triggers don't care about heroism, right?— that means if everybody went all out, you get a lot of dead capes and the heroes lose. Nobody wants that fight— it isn't worth it, everybody wants nice stuff and toppling the government fucks it all up. But that's the numbers. If it happened, the heroes would lose. If everyone goes hardcore, everybody loses.

So yeah, unwritten rules. Concessions. So any villain that isn't balls-to-the-walls crazy has a reason to keep things cool, keep the damage down. They have a way out. The ones that play nice, they won't even be unmasked if they get caught. If they break out of jail, all their stuff is fine. So they got a reason to not start blasting the shit out of everything when cornered."

I frowned. I could sort of see the argument. Enough to not dismiss it out of hand, at least.

The government didn't have the monopoly on force, so it couldn't operate on the tacit assumption that it would win a war to the knife. More importantly, even if they did win, the collateral would be horrific. The enemy would never be defeated, because there were always new parahumans, and— apparently— the statistical fact was more would be villains than heroes. The weakened scarcity economy of this world was too fragile to absorb more than a certain amount of collateral damage.

Of course, the technology in my solarchives could make for a very different paradigm. It must. Some measure of panopticon surveillance is necessary when you have nanofabrication. Otherwise, all it took was some kid having one bad day, and then the hab was being eaten by disassemblers.

As I absorbed the concept, the girl smiled. "Yeah. So, unwritten rules. Obviously no hard-and-fast list, but respect secret identities, don't unmask capes or fuck with their families. Don't fuck up meetings under truce, don't kill if you can help it, don't attack people with no stakes in shit, random civilians or whatever. Don't mind control or rape or… yeah, you get the idea."

"Quite," I said. "Very well then, you've told me. Anything else?"

"Come on, you don't want to hang out?" She sat down in my chair— my only chair— and pouted at me.

"No."

"Fine," she said blithely. "Can't say I didn't try, right?"

She got up and walked toward the door. She looked back. "I'll be back by in a week— no, a few days? Tomorrow, to see the finished thing." With that, she exited the building.

Annoying.

But I would put up with these annoying people if it got me back to proper, civilized quality of life.

Then? The ball would be in my court.

— — —

There was no roaring engine, or even a hum, but as the desktop-level cornucopia machine silently came online, I felt relief. It couldn't make everything, but it could make a lot of things I needed, things the portable fabber could not. Truly quality feedstock was still an issue, but the deliveries were a passable substitute for now.

The first run was two more portable fabbers. I buried one outside the city. The other was covered in cement, and dumped off a pier.

Having done that, the stress of being one attack or accident from disaster faded even more. I could focus on other things.

The fabber was assembling an automech, and I took photogrammetric scans of the building and assigned material categories. Terahertz scans were quickly composited over the data by the design suite. Outside was marked ignore, rooms were sketched out… ugly bricks to be walled over and support frames to be replaced outright. Once I was done, Sia piped the schematic into a suite of design programs and rapidly filled the fabber queue. More automechs, paneling, structural framework, data spimes, canisters of repair sprays, tanks of liquid polymer... If I had to deal with feeding the fabber for all that, it would take forever— but I didn't. The moment the automech completed, Sia took control of it, and it began dragging more materials into the fab.

By the time Tattletale invited herself back into my home, things looked very different.v Almost civilized, even.

"How's it going Hen— oh."

She jerked to a stop just inside the door.

Smooth, tinted carbon-plastic composite walls. A thin carpeted floor. It was a killbox, with still-empty sockets for turrets and other traps. The entrance hallway led to a sharp U-turn, hiding the rest of the facility from sight.

Not a smidge of dust, dirt, debris, or rust to be seen. Not even a stain.

"...You definitely need to work on my place." She gave me a sidelong look. "You can do more than colored walls and carpet? Yeah. I'm tempted to just move in here."

"What does Coil want now?"

"I'm hurt," Tattletale said, her tone mock-wounded. "You think I'm only here for him?"

I sighed. "As you say… come on then." I led her down the hall. It terminated in a large room, which currently only held a table and chairs. Against the wall was a refrigerator— a local model. I had better uses for fab time.

"Oh shit, is that a robot!?" Tattletale said. Open surprise was painted across her face. She was looking through an open door at an automech, currently feeding broken computer graphic cards into the desktop fabber.

"Guns, armor, biotinkering, robots… you're starting to scare me, Henry," she said lightly, but her body language suggested it wasn't just a joke. "Is there anything you can't do?"

"I can't make you go away, apparently," I replied, and she gave a weak laugh. She dropped into a chair.

"Okay… so let's get the boring stuff done with. Coil wants a hundred plasma rifles."

"Impossible," I said flatly. "My machines aren't good enough, and I don't have some materials I would need. Not to mention I have yet to see his promised money."

"Yeah, well, Coil doesn't see it that way." She sighed. "I'm supposed to sell you on it, but it's difficult to work with this hard a sell. He said the materials he is delivering is more than enough. It was weird. He seemed upset about something, but he didn't go into details."

I glanced at my rifle consideringly.

Yes, it was impossible.

A plasma rifle was a high-energy weapon. It used as much power in a few shots as the average home here used in a day. That didn't sound like much, but that was the usage of a grid-wired home over 24 hours, drawn in seconds from a man-portable battery. Massive, instant bursts of power.

That battery was the biggest problem. Chemical battery technology had been refined a lot since this time period, but at the end of the day, it just wasn't good enough for man-portable energy weapons. Nothing was, until you leaped across a gulf of complexity to something altogether different.

The highest-capacity rechargeable battery I knew of was the momentum battery. It used room temperature superconductors, composed of twisted bilayer graphene, gold, and electrum. The superconductors served to suspend countless nanoscopic flywheels, pinned by quantum locks on magnetic flux lines. The entire assembly floated within a frictionless gyroscope built on similar principles. The end result was orders of magnitude more energy storage than that provided by chemical batteries— the only hard limit was the tensile strength of the carbon nanotube flywheels. The downside was the level of detail. Nothing about them was on a macro scale, so for the fabber AI no shortcuts on print time were possible.

Technically, I could still make one. But if I did it today it'd be lucky to finish in a week, and the slightest print error would tank the storage capacity or even force me to restart the print from scratch. Meanwhile, I'd get nothing done. Only a fool would willingly spend their time making the flashiest gun when they needed to build an economic foundation.

But I doubted Coil wanted to hear that, so I'd simply have to lie.

"Even with the materials I've received, I couldn't make one of these. I'd need…" I pulled up a "low-budget" plasma rifle schematic, a fusion reactor, and a high-grade chemical battery design. "Yttrium, cerium, praseodymium… the whole range of rare earth elements really. Right now I only have the subset common to electronics and automobiles. Deuterium, tritium, hydrogen and argon are used in the fuel. There's also lithium, germanium, phosphorus, sulfur, and gold in the power cells… I'll just print a list for you. If he wants something like that, he'll have to provide all the materials. And I don't have the machines to make things like that in bulk. I need more time."

"...Great, thanks," she said, slumping back. "What's your plan anyway, with all this?" She waved her hand vaguely.

"Mmm," I said noncommittally. "Coil doesn't need my plans."

"What if I'm not asking for him?" Tattletale said. She hesitated. "Maybe you aren't the only one getting a bad deal."

I paused.

"I'll need to think about that."

"Yeah. Okay."

She sat there quietly for a while, watching the automechs drag materials in and parts out. I watched her. Sometimes, her brow would furrow, or her eyes widened slightly. I was not sure as to the cause.

She didn't say anything more. After a few hours, she sighed and stood up. She rubbed her temples and winced. "If anyone asks, I spent all these hours negotiating with you."

"Sure," I said, amused, and led her out.

— — —


	3. CH2 - PRT Interlude

CH2 - PRT Interlude

— — —

" _What should my caption be?_

 _I want it to be clever." - #SELFIE_

— — —

Connecting to . … Success.

Logging in… Complete. VPN tunnel to internal network established.

Connecting to database… Connected. JID: 64dc2c38-8157-4579-8124-c8124f0ce378

Special credentials forwarded. Security clearance confirmed. Access to peripherals granted.

Warning (modeless): 586347 megabytes of OTP remaining on router 12B. Average bandwidth usage for router 12B: 6725MB/day. Urgency: Yellow. Please order a replacement Ecolex-12 module at the earliest opportunity. Asymmetric cryptography fallbacks are disallowed for classified information systems.

Rerouting modal dialog window to log file: "Please note: All access is logged. Sharing of access credentials is strictly prohibited. Unauthorized usage will be punished to the maximum extent possible under federal law."

Indexing cameras, screens… Done.

Initializing avatar simulation. Script interfaces loaded. Running.

The conference room snapped into view, and from the vantage point of the security cameras she saw the CGI face she presented to the world start up quietly on a screen to the right. In the same moment, she deactivated the screen.

There wasn't anything she could contribute to this meeting that Armsmaster could not do alone. Given how upset he was last night, she did not think he would appreciate her presence today.

Armsmaster was standing near the screen at the far end, and Assault and Battery were sitting near the door. Between them were Dauntless, Miss Militia, Velocity, and Aegis on one side. Director Piggot and Deputy Director Renick sat on the other. Aegis looked like he wasn't sure what he was supposed to be doing.

As she watched, Triumph slipped in the door, looking embarrassed.

"Now that we're all here," Piggot said, giving him no time to speak. "It's your show, Armsmaster."

Armsmaster didn't move, but the large screen against the wall lit up, and a overhead map of Brockton Bay appeared. A green line appeared, starting in the woods just outside the city, and crossing over before going out to sea. Beside it, the Earth spinning slowly, with another green line around it.

"This was the flight trajectory of the latest satellite in orbit. Much of this is from event reconstruction; it was small, fast, and barely showed up on radar as it exited United States airspace. It reached low earth orbit in less than ten minutes, and was quickly escalated up the chain, ultimately earning a brief threat check with WEDGDG. Given size, speed, and performance, it was assumed to be tinkertech. A note was made to keep an eye out locally."

The image on screen switched, to various devices laid out on a table, over boxes of text.

"The next day, a new parahuman was seen at the local market here in Brockton Bay. He has been codenamed Black Box for now. He was selling tinkertech. Given obvious mutations to the head, it is possible that he is a Case 53. Protocols for Case 53s suggested a light touch, and the analysts concurred. They recommended purchasing tech samples before taking further action. This was done, and they were brought in for testing."

"During the testing, I noticed unusual efficiency in design, more than most tinkertech displays. This could be the result of a tinker specialty that requires narrow tolerances, or simply a personal trait. Performance of the items has not degraded yet, and none have failed. It was all solid state, with no seams or fasteners."

"The most important thing is that there were no third party components. Nothing conventional off the shelf, nothing that could be recognized from tinkertech part distributors, legal or illegal. By all evidence, every item purchased was one hundred percent custom design and manufacture, from the ground up."

He shifted in place. It was slight, but small details stood out to her regardless. He wasn't happy with what he had to say.

"I realized the next day that the battery design alone would require nanoscopic manufacturing processes. I take full responsibility for the delay; the samples were brought in late the day before, and I did not see the implications. According to protocols in place since Eagleton, I flagged the report and uploaded it to WEDGDG servers."

She noticed Piggot frown.

"The response was potential but not immediate threat. Full measures against the tinker were considered high-risk, but according to WEDGDG operating within the same limits as applied to more typical tinkers is unlikely to provoke a high-risk event."

"I still think that's the wrong approach, but I've been stonewalled," Piggot interjected.

"...Yes," Armsmaster said after a moment. "They recommended soft touch, authorized approach. In the event the parahuman commits a crime, only escalate as justified by something other than nanotechnology."

"I'm sure we will be able to think of something," Piggot said.

Armsmaster frowned.

"Kill order has been pre-authorized, contingent on evidence of self-replication."

Piggot opened her mouth.

" _Hard_ evidence," Armsmaster quickly continued. "Tactical thermobaric missiles have been moved to neighboring cities from the Eagleton quarantine zone. They will be on standby if needed to help shut down a self replicating nanotechnology event."

"That concludes the read-in."

"Is that all we know?" Battery asked.

"No. Tinkertech of the same type is being sold through the Brockton Bay board on PHO. It is delivered by autonomous robots. Payment is taken by the robot, and any attempt to rob or track the robot results in a self-destruct, destroying both it and it's cargo with explosives and disassembler nanites. We have not had any encounters with the tinker himself. The only thing we can work with is the delivery robots, and they do not fight, only try to escape or self destruct."

"What matters is how do we kill them," Piggot said.

"As far as nanomachines like the disassemblers go, their weakness is temperature. Any given design at that scale deals poorly with heat or cold."

"And the robots?" Miss Militia said.

"Armor piercing ammunition, 'dragon's breath' ammunition, incendiaries. These all have collateral damage and PR issues, unfortunately. Assault and Battery might work for crippling, after which flamethrowers could be applied if needed. It is also worth trying Dauntless' Arclance. I'm currently working on better countermeasures."

"Is there any reason to think we will need to fight?" Velocity asked. "I read the list up there— batteries, solar panels, stuff like that. It's a crime, but it's white collar. We have drug dealers and neo-Nazis on the streets."

"This is just being prepared," Miss Militia responded. "We can't ignore a crime in progress, no matter how trivial, so if we encounter one of these robots we need to know how to fight them. In case it comes to that."

"It will," Piggot said firmly. "Someone like this is dangerous. Watchdog wants us to pussyfoot around, fine, but we all know that anyone willing to use these 'disassemblers' in a goddamn delivery robot is going to cross the line sooner or later. We better be ready when they do." She stood up roughly. "I think I've said all I need to say about this."

She stalked out, letting the door thump shut.

"...Well, that's…" Triumph started, then trailed off.

"She has some personal history with Nilbog," Assault finally said. "It's not the same, but the Machine Army in Eagleton is similar, so…" He leaned back, shrugging.

"I see," Triumph said.

"Eagleton quarantine favors energy Blasters. Unfortunately, the closest we have at our branch is Dauntless, and to an extent Miss Militia. They… are not the type of Blaster they recommend. Director Piggot has authorized me to reach out to New Wave and have their adult membership read in sometime this week to help cover that. I've requested special authorization to hire Faultline's Crew for Spitfire, if necessary. That is still under review at a higher level."

There was silence, for a minute.

"Did we miss anything? Any other ideas..." Battery looked around the table.

"No, I think that's all," Armsmaster said, after a pause. "There just isn't enough to go on right now."

Everyone started standing up.

"I will schedule another meeting if anything new comes up," Armsmaster said.

Dragon watched everyone filing out of the conference room, and quietly disconnected.


	4. CH3 - Introductions

CH3 - Introductions

— — —

 _"Scathing eyes ask that we be symmetrical, one sided and easily processed. Yet every misshapen spark's unseen beauty is greater than its would be judgement." - RWBY Yellow_

— — —

 **Private message from XxVoid_CowboyxX:**

 **XxVoid_CowboyxX:** hey you sell tinkertech?

 **FocusedLithium:** Yes. I sell:

Drop-in, rechargeable upgrades for all common battery types  
Flexible, slim universal power boosters for phones and common devices  
Large emergency power banks  
Efficient wireless power transmitters  
High-efficiency solar panels  
Wall-clinging gloves and socks  
Holographic projectors  
Transforming smart clothing  
Environmentally sealable smart clothing  
Augmented reality specs  
Autonomous housekeeping drones

Other items are available. I am open to special requests. There are limits on the technology I am willing to sell to the public, however.

A larger, detailed catalogue with pricing is available here: [LINK]

 **XxVoid_CowboyxX:** cool, can I get a sample? just so I know its for real

 **FocusedLithium:** Payment is on delivery, so you do not assume any risk. There are no free samples.

 **XxVoid_CowboyxX:** ive only got like 30 dollars can you give me a discount

 **XxVoid_CowboyxX:** hello

 **XxVoid_CowboyxX:** dude you there

— — —

When it came to my new online business, I didn't have to do much. Sia handled most of it without any input on my part.

This was good, because the money was all but worthless.

What wasn't worthless were contacts. Given that Coil was— for the moment— satisfying the material requirements of establishing something _vaguely_ resembling modern infrastructure, I was only selling to build reputation and relationships. Even in this capitalist society, reputation remained a universal currency. It was just… less explicit than I was used to.

Hopefully, those contacts would include tinkers. It was obvious that tinkertech could do things that transhuman technology could not.

That, I needed. I wasn't sure whether I wanted to return home, or to stay here. What I did know was that the technology I had wasn't going to cut it either way.

But right now, I had a bigger problem. Coil.

He still wanted plasma rifles like mine. Though I had never demonstrated the thing, I could only assume that somehow, he knew its destructive power. He seemed to have a way of knowing things he shouldn't.

The impatience was easy to understand. As far as he knew, I made the one I had, and he was probably aware of how fast I produced other things. It didn't take a leap of logic to see how he would conclude I was just stalling him.

But telling him the truth was insane, and even if he believed me, I doubted he would have a problem with crippling my manufacturing build up just to get what he wanted now. It might even be a bonus.

I was getting tired of dealing with this man. He made sure that I got all my materials through him, so I had no good outside source of bulk feedstock, and had never delivered a dollar of the money he promised. All a game of control. A clumsy effort to shackle me to him.

I had to remind myself I was only humoring him. Just until my feedstock refining machinery was done. It let me tolerate things.

For now.

The real puzzle was Tattletale. She was clearly supposed to be spying on me, and just as clearly making no effort. Right now, she was sprawled across a couch in my lounge.

"Don't you have a team to hang out with?" I said.

"Yep."

I resisted the urge to massage my forehead, and just gave her a flat look.

"...Then why are you here."

"I get bored," she admitted. "Regent plays video games, Bitch only cares about dogs, and for Grue it's just a job. They don't know about Coil, either— who else am I gonna complain to?"

"Coil? What does he want this time?"

"He has me after the Ward's identities, the creep. It's all 'just get it done', too, he doesn't care about how difficult social hacks are, or how easy it is to fall in a PRT honeypot. My power is intuition, not magic, you know? He needs to just fuck off."

"So why work for him?"

She sighed. "He recruited me at gunpoint. That sucked, but I'll be honest: I was stealing tourist's money and getting by on what I could spend from their accounts before anti-Thinker bullshit locked them down. I didn't know what I was doing, and this guy did. Threatened me, yeah, but it's easy money and all the stuff I'm bad at is handled by other people. It was fun— is fun, when he isn't breathing down my neck."

"Is this your way of saying I should just work for Coil?" I said dryly.

"No. I've seen enough to know you're on a whole different level. The good outweighed the suck with Coil for me, but you? You're just using him."

I tensed. "If you know that…"

"...Why haven't I told him?" she said, grinning. "Because I'm not stupid. If he could have gotten you locked down he would have already done it. He's obsessed with being in control, and yet with you he's got nothing. I don't know how or why, but you're too strong for him to piss off."

"That explains why he hasn't done anything. Not why you haven't told him," I noted.

"Alright," she said. "All cards on the table. This cape shit is a game, okay? Maybe not for you, but it is for me. Coil telling me to dig up people's secret identities? I told you about the unwritten rules, so you know that's not the way to play. I don't like it. I'm just… keeping my options open."

"Hm."

"How did you put it when we met? I want you to be my friend," she said, leaning forward with an all-too-amused smile.

"You are a troublesome girl… but I understand," I said. "I'll keep it in mind."

"Great," she chirped. "My name's Lisa, by the way. Only fair since I have yours…"

"I suppose." It was a better handle than Tattletale.

"Yeah… so, there's this job that Coil wants the Undersiders to do. I think you should come."

"Job?"

"Yeah, he wants us to rob the Ruby Dreams casino."

I had been laying low. Despite the increasing furor over my tinkertech sales on PHO, I had not been seen in public since the market. To reappear doing a robbery…

"No."

"Come on," she complained. "You'll get in a fight sooner or later. At least this way you can feel them out somewhere that it isn't on your doorstep."

"It isn't about the fight," I denied. "I'm not interested in being spun as some moustache-twirling villain. I have greater goals."

"Oh?" Lisa leaned forward, grinning. "Like what?"

"Don't worry about it," I said.

She huffed. "Fine. What about selling us some tech? The good stuff, not the cutesy family-friendly PHO stuff."

"That's… you're trying awful hard to get me tangled up in your business, aren't you?" I challenged.

"It'll happen sooner or later," she said unapologetically. "Might as well be sooner."

"We'll see. That isn't a reason to give you 'the good stuff'."

"Hmmm…" She pursed her lips, scrutinizing me. "Okay, how about this. I'll give you contact info and an introduction to the Number Man. He's basically like, _the_ villain banker. Money laundering, anonymous accounts, electronic whatever, all those problems? Gone."

"I'm sure Coil will be pleased," I said. She grinned.

"I won't tell him if you won't."

"I don't suppose you know where he is getting my materials from…"

She made a face. "Sorry, the Number Man is an exception, not the rule. There isn't some magic one-stop guy for materials. Except maybe Toybox. But no, that's parts, not the kind of stuff you use." She shook her head. "Anyway. This lets you use the money piling up in your basement for more than your shady deals with creepy robots. You can reach out yourself under whatever fake names the Number Man gives you, take deliveries at some random warehouse. More options for you."

"Fine," I relented.

"Great," she said, grinning. "You also need a real cape name."

"What's wrong with FocusedLithium?"

"...Everything."

— — —

The next time I saw Lisa, she looked worn out. She trudged inside without a word, and fell down onto my couch.

"Hello to you too," I said after a minute. She made unintelligible noises into the fabric.

I stood there patiently, and she finally rolled onto her side. "We need better stuff."

"I take it your job didn't go well."

"It went fine," she said defensively. "It's just that the ABB were kind of mad at us, and they heard we were there…"

"So it didn't go well."

She scowled at me. "Yeah, well, I met someone interesting. New girl, controls bugs. She fucked Lung up good, we just held him down until he was out. Then bailed before Armsmaster showed."

"So should we expect a new Ward soon?" I said idly.

"...I'm thinking the Undersiders should recruit her," she said. "She would make a good heavy, and she seems a little suicidal. I could help her get over it—"

"Don't fool yourself," I interrupted. "If you want her for her power, just say so."

"It's not about her power," she protested. "She's messed up, and nobody is doing anything."

"I don't see you considering any solution other than making her a criminal. It's surely within your ability…"

She just looked at me like I'd pissed in her cereal.

"So, about that tinkertech," she said abruptly. "I think we need some armor or something, definitely need some better weapons. I know you've got something good." She gave me a winning smile.

I sighed, recognizing she wasn't interested in talking about the girl anymore. It wasn't like I really cared. Besides, I'd long ago developed a disdain for those who would deny other's agency for any reason. This 'bug girl' could make her own decisions… or mistakes. She was a person, not a pet. If she went along with Lisa's foolishness… better for her to make her mistakes with Lisa.

There were certainly worse people she could be listening to.

"It depends on how flashy you want to be," I said. "I can sell you an inferior equivalent to the PRT's foam sprayers, wireless ranged tasers… or if you don't mind looking skeevy, there are agonizers. They use microwaves to induce pain. Harmless but…"

"Not the best PR," she finished, nodding. "No, I dunno, personal shields or anything like that?"

"No," I said. "Not in the sense you mean. Maybe someday."

She studied my face, and I wondered what she was thinking. I knew her power was some kind of deduction, but not how far it went.

Surely not too far, or she would be saying very different things.

"What about melee?"

"What about it?" I shrugged. "Collapsible shock baton, shock gloves. I don't have a lot of nonlethal weapons, that's the real issue."

Her eyes widened before she schooled her face. "I see. Okay… Grue would kill for the shock gloves, I want the stunner and agonizer. Bitch… ugh." She rolled, staring at the ceiling. "She won't even wear a real costume," she whined.

She slowly sat up. "Okay. Regent would want the shocker or stunner integrated in his scepter. He's big on looking dumb and harmless. What about armor?"

"I'm guessing you don't want power armor for everyone," I said. "In order to fit with your current styles I'd need everyone to come in for a look. I can definitely make you all immune to normal blades, shrapnel, and so on. Where plating is allowed, similarly bulletproof. Smartmatter and interlocking paneling can do almost as good everywhere else, if you don't mind the look of it."

"That might be a problem for me, but everyone else should be able to work with that," she said. "Except Bitch. Grue will have to talk to her— she's impossible."

"Alright," I said simply.

She stretched back out on the couch. "I don't feel like going home, so I'm just going to stay here."

I sighed.

— — —

People slowed, staring, as I strode down the boardwalk. My entoptics flicker-highlighted cell phones being pulled out and aimed at me, clearing as each was ruled out as a weapon.

There was a reason for all the attention, and this time it wasn't the fins radiating heat on my skull. Rather than wearing normal clothing, today I wore my armor.

Given I entered the Gate as a consultant, I'd favored speed and convenience over sheer protection, so it was a simple design, with optimization lost to aesthetics as well. The mission had been last second, after all— I'd grabbed the best thing laying around already fabbed.

Organoweave fibers, fullerene, and smart materials combined into a smooth, grey form fitting suit that left nothing to the imagination. What kept it from being vulgar— in this time and place, at least— was the heavy body armor. Blue-grey metal wrapped my pelvis. Hard-edged slabs of the same alloy covered my limbs save for the joints, and where unmoving metal wouldn't work, overlapping panels of of reactive smartmatter took over. Atop it all a simple harness hung empty, the same golden-brown as my gloves and boots. Today, I left my weapons at home.

Given that it was a hypercorp design, it was as sharp as any costume was likely to be. Definitely sharper than I could make anything look.

Which was why I was here.

I learned a long time ago that if I wasn't good at something, I should find someone that was, and have them do it instead. There is a trap that many fall into. The misconception goes that specialists are costly, so you're better off doing it yourself. This might even be true, if you cannot afford them. But the reality is they often can charge so much because their skill represents countless hours of mistakes learned. It's easy to get tripped up by some gotcha they overcame long ago, and the next thing you know?

You've spent too long on it. You could have made more in that time than the guy charged, just sticking to what you were good at. You wanted to 'save money', but you came out with less in the end. And most of the time, that do-it-yourselfer won't even realize they lost.

What I was bad at was art. I didn't know why… well, I did, sort of. It was too fuzzy for me. No matter how much math was used in an aesthetic design… sure, there were ways to quantify it all, but for me it was a hassle, a mental pain to deal with. I didn't want to learn.

Regrettably, form sometimes mattered as much as function.

Ahead of me was a simple tourist trap. The only thing that set it apart from the rest was the gigantic stuffed animals doing some kind of performance in front. Eastern dragons slowly swimming through the air, toy lions leaping about.

At first I distracted the crowd, but after I just leaned against a building to watch, most of them went back to watching the animals.

The reason I was here only faltered a moment, glancing at me, before getting back to the job. She was in a full-body costume, done up like a old porcelain doll. There wasn't the slightest patch of skin shown; even around her eyes, what little showed was covered in paint. Her hair was an obvious blonde wig.

This was Parian, a local rogue. She studiously avoided the 'game', as Lisa would call it, only using her powers for business, entertaining and doing promotions. An interview in a local magazine revealed that she was a fashion student outside of this. She only entered the scene at all to for the money and attention. An edge. She made all the animals and mascots herself from cloth and thread on the fly, and they looked good. She intended to reveal her identity someday, but not yet. When she felt it would best benefit her fashion design career, I assumed.

Driven. Studying to make a career in fashion design rather than trying to live off her power forever, something entirely possible. Rejecting unnecessary conflict, in direct contravention of the impulses in every parahuman. It couldn't last, I knew, but it was impressive nonetheless. I needed an artist's touch, and judging from the puppets before me, she had it.

In the eyes of these heroes and villains, she was nobody. That was the only reason she had been able to do this unmolested for so long. All that mattered to them was power. They saw the stuffed animals, and they looked away. Any other skills she possessed were meaningless. I saw things differently.

It was simply a matter of convincing her, and I had just the angle.

The crowd was thinning, the animals unraveling and transforming into rolls of cloth and thread, fluff pouring into boxes like it was alive. Children looked back enraptured even as the parents started to lead them away.

A few animals remained, even gaining a little bulk. I noticed her glancing at me, tension in her profile. Even so, once everything was packed up, I approached.

"Parian, I believe? My name is Epsilon— I also go by FocusedLithium on PHO." I smiled pleasantly, extending my hand.

After a moment of staring at it, she reached out and took it briefly, before quickly pulling her hand away. "Hello," she said. "What do you want?" I could actually hear a faint undercurrent of tension to her voice. No doubt this was not the first time she had been approached by a cape…

"Nothing much," I said. "I read your interview in the Brockton Splash— that you were studying fashion design?"

"Oh?" She was still guarded, but her voice became slightly more relaxed. "I'd think you were looking for costume work, but I can see you don't need it."

"It's funny you mention that— I'm afraid the artist I worked with in the past is no longer available. I'm a tinker, and I can make things, but… they do not always look as good as they function."

"You're looking for someone to collaborate with." The tension was completely gone at this point.

"Yes," I said. "I have quite a bit of money to work with, and can get any material you care to name. I know you aren't a tinker, but with what you're doing, you know nobody cares. I think we could make great things. Money, of course, and obviously there's something to be said for known figures wearing your designs..."

"I'm… interested, but I don't even know if you made your costume," she said carefully. "I've never heard of you…"

"I understand. Here's a card— feel free to look my thread up. There's a number of reviews there. Call the number if you're interested." I offered her a card formed from carbon nanotubing, weaved in the same manner as cloth, with the text fused onto it. I saw it flex oddly in her hand.

"I will. If that's all…"

"Yes, thank you for your time," I said, stepping back.

If my understanding was correct, Parian wouldn't respond well to pressure. The ball was in her court now.

— — —

[Routing cellular communication from contact: Lisa.]

"Henry I need help _right no_ —" A burst of static filled the line. " —crazy bomber bitch Bakuda—" A sharp pop, static.

"—black hole—"

[Connection lost.]

"...Stupid girl."

— — —


	5. CH4 - Mono No Aware

CH4 - Mono No Aware

— — —

" _You wretched excuses for life. Trying so hard to adapt yourselves to the vast reaches we have already conquered. Cutting yourselves open, programming yourselves, adding this, subtracting that. All to make yourselves into what I already am." - Thieving Magpie_

— — —

The mind is just software. We understand it. Mostly.

The body is just a shell.

Death? Just another disease. We've overcome it.

Everyone dies.

The vast majority of humanity survived the Fall through egocast. Their egos transmitted offworld. They didn't die. Obviously. They can tell, they are who they were yesterday…

No other possibility is allowed.

Some worry over continuity of consciousness, but no one questions it when they lie down to sleep. Whenever the signal drops to a simple wave, devoid of meaning. In that moment, does some mysterious "self" that looks out your eyes vanish? Replaced upon awakening with a new, different "you". Confident in their continuity. It was only sleep. Anyone will tell you it's just a "different" state of consciousness. Nothing was lost. Not a lie— they firmly believe it.

No other possibility is allowed.

Don't think about it.

And if there are things you can't forget… we can fix that. Just a "transfer" into a simulspace, a few (hundred) rounds of iterative (stab in the dark) psychosurgery on your mind. We'll create a you that, when instanced and tested, has the desired properties! (Eventually.)

One more transfer. You wake up— or rather it was all "seamless", your memory says so— and it just doesn't bother you anymore. Whatever it was.

I think about it.

People still manage to die. Even with cortical stacks, backups and forks. Especially in dirty business, risky business. And if they don't? They'll die by inches. What meaning is continuity when they inevitably become a stranger? When they become unrecognizable. Are they the same person?

After you've lived long enough, assuming you don't just... _erase it_... the scar tissue builds up.

I learn not to get too attached.

In the most optimistic future… do you think the man (thing) staring into the last black hole as the universe dies will still be "you"? You have more in common with a tree.

You are already dead.

Despite all this, I find myself a fool.

My first instinct was right. Lisa was trouble.

— — —

 _Get me a location, Sia._

[Processing…]

[It is not possible to trace this call with current capabilities. However, the phrase 'black hole' can be linked to an intense gravity field. A violent gravitational disturbance was detected around the same time. Location: a storage facility only a few miles from here.]

A thought had it plotted. This time, it was not a simple arrow, but a line superimposed over the world, showing the best possible path.

Robotic arms quickly assembled my armor. Articulated smartmatter and slabs of metal locking together over the bodysuit I always wore. Weapons affixed to my hips and my back.

Had I planned for violence, I'd have had better weapons and armor available. Unfortunately, I needed to make do with what I had.

On my left hip was a vortex ring gun, a less-lethal two-handed weapon. It detonated special cartridges, generating a blast of explosive pressure. The barrel twisted those forces into a high-speed vortex ring, a spinning, expanding donut shaped concussive blast. It was designed so that I could add chemicals, but this was close quarters. Lisa was far too vulnerable for that.

On the other side I had a stunner. It did as the name implied, creating a momentary conductive plasma channel through the air and then transmitting a powerful, modulated electric current through it. I had numerous other devices secreted throughout my harness, but those were my primary weapons.

My plasma rifle was magnetically clamped to my upper back.

More than enough, normally. But against these 'tinkers'? A bomb tinker, even. I wasn't sure.

But life is what happens when you are busy making plans.

I followed the green line floating in space, sprinting where I could. I vaulted barriers as best I could, and by the ten-second mark, Sia had a parkour skillsoft swapped in. The route flickered, and I tic-tac jumped my way up the walls of an alleyway, spun on one heel, and started running the rooftops.

The distance to the storage facility as the crow flies was 2.3 miles. Even with this heavily streamlined ground route, it was around 3.4 miles. At the full limits of my morph?

[Estimated travel time: five minutes.]

Too long.

I couldn't help but wonder what I would find. The unwritten rules suggested Lisa should be fine… but if she believed that, would she have been so panicked? Her flaw was hardly jumping at the first sign of danger; if anything, it was overconfidence. The implications were unpleasant.

Green highlighted the boundaries of the storage facility coming into sight, a red dot marking the gravity spike. It wasn't necessary, though— I could see people running around. Some looked like generic muscle, but others were wearing suits, school uniforms, and other attire that looked completely out of place compared to the pistols and rifles held clumsily in their hands.

I leaped onto the first storage locker, rolling to avoid too much noise. The effort was wasted. Any noise I made was swallowed up by the loud cracks and rumbles of explosions. Quickly scanning the scene, I finally spotted the Undersiders. I had seen them before— Lisa was kind enough to show me costumed selfies in expectation of 'toys'. Wouldn't want any armor to crimp their style.

It was unfortunate that she had not asked for gear sooner.

They were standing surrounded by at least thirty people in a half circle, all armed with guns. I couldn't risk attacking, or they might reflexively fire— and all it would take is one lucky hit.

Moving as quietly as I could, I approached. It got easier, as a distorted sound filled the air. It trook a moment to identify it as poorly resynthesized laughter. The woman wearing a gas mask— Bakuda, I assumed— shoved a gun in some kid's hands.

She turned and pointed at a thug by the jeep. "Get the camera out and start rolling." The man reached into the jeep, grabbing a camera. He aimed at the Undersiders, his hand wavering.

"Thank you for waiting, Park Jihoo." Bakuda turned her attention to the kid with the gun. "You can shoot someone now."

I tensed, glanding Kick. There was no more time.

The kid, shaking, started to lift his arm. I moved.

A blazing line formed between him and my stunner, and he jerked. Without any warning, his body liquefied, the soupy mess splattering to the ground. The crowd screamed. My mind stalled at the unexpected result. Just long enough for Bakuda to trace the afterimage, her head following. She was looking at me. She jerked, pointing.

"Shoot him!"

Sluggishly, the crowd pulled together, firing their guns in my direction. Unfortunately for them, they were obviously untrained. Few hits landed, and those that did inflicted only scratches. One thing was for sure: they weren't pointing at the Undersiders now. The moment the thought solidified, I pulled my vortex gun and fired.

The cartridge detonated, the chemical energy transformed into a diffused plasma. The energetic gases were pushed violently through a mix of physical and electromagnetic channels. A ring of gas, visible only through the way it distorted light, came bursting out of the weapon, the roof bending and tearing as the recoil stressed my boots' griplock. The vortex ring smashed into the crowd, knocking them down and sending several tumbling through the dirt of the alley.

In the back of my mind, I noted vortexes didn't cause my targets to spontaneously melt.

The Undersiders took the opportunity to run, but the explosions further down the alley suggested they weren't off the hook.

I turned to fire at Bakuda. "Dead man's switch!" Bakuda suddenly shouted, panic evident even through the synthesizer. She started running, aiming a grenade launcher at me.

Processing her words had me stop at the last moment, instead leaping to the side. The canister zipped through the air, and then I was blinded by fire. Warning lights blinked madly as I bounced across another storage locker, clipping the edge and then hitting the ground.

I stood up quickly, turning to see Bakuda jumping into the jeep, the engine roaring to life. I lifted the vortex gun before pausing. On the dirt with nothing for me to grip, it could throw me backwards and still do nothing to stop a several-ton jeep. The stunner had melted the last person I shot…

Before I could think of a solution, the jeep came racing toward me, and I had no more time. On reflex I fired my stunner at the driver. The wire-thin conductive plasma channel struck the windshield, only carving a short distorted scratch before cutting out. Then the jeep was on me, and I jumped to the side, rolling and popping back up as the jeep swerved, first right, then left as it skidded madly on the dirt. Finally, the driver managed to spin it around.

"Who the FUCK do you think you are!" shouted Bakuda, the synthetic voice echoing through the alley. She was standing upright in the jeep, fumbling with her grenade launcher. I ignored her, putting one foot against the locker behind me. I aimed the vortex gun carefully, and fired.

The nearly invisible donut of air flew just above the hood, clipping and shattering the windshield. Bakuda was knocked backwards by the wind. I slapped the vortex gun to my side and drew the stunner. I fired, and this time the line connected with the driver.

An eruption of light and sound blinded me, and it cleared just in time for me to see the burning, shredded jeep barrel into me, slamming me into and through the storage locker behind me. The reactive plating on my abdomen blew, but it was meaningless in the face of at least two tons of metal— all my armor could do was distribute the force.

[Severe bruising and assorted organ damage is in effect. Multiple skeletal fractures. Dispensing MRDR.]

"...Let's see you get up from this!"

I heard a thump, and before I could move my eyes burned.

All of me burned, actually— freezerburn? I blinked, the world blurring. Literally; there was something wrong with my eyes.

I had a face-concealing helmet, and it wasn't compromised— this didn't make any sense. It was like my armor was completely ignored.

[Utilizing all active scanning methods. Compositing AR.]

Everything turned into a kaleidoscope, then the blurred world reappeared, covered in highlighting and lines. What I assumed to be thick ice encrusted everything.

 _Sia, tactical sitrep!_

[The storage locker is frozen. At least 30% of the volume is filled with ice. Massive temperature drop measured by all sensors. Smart vac suit, reactive armor, vortex gun, stunner, plasma rifle outside operational temperature range. Rapid temperature drop has caused mechanical damage. Severe tissue damage. Body temperature rapidly decreasing.]

I struggled to move, but nothing happened. Formerly flexible smartmatter was frozen in place, and it left me with no leverage.

[Body temperature is dangerously low.]

I needed a way out.

 _Sia…_

My thoughts seemed sluggish.

 _...fire the vortex gun._

The gun on my hip exploded violently, every cartridge inside detonating moments later in a chain reaction. The combined force obliterated the ice formations, sending much of it flying out the only opening like frozen buckshot. The jeep was shoved a full meter back, and the damaged joints of my bodysuit fractured. For a moment, I couldn't even think as blinding pain racked me. After a moment, though, neurological thresholds tripped. The sensations were clamped.

Looking at my entoptics, I saw the cause: my left hip had been shattered.

There was no time to think about it.

I fell forward onto the hood of the jeep, reaching and pulling myself forward. Looking out the locker's destroyed roll-up door I saw Bakuda, a dozen feet away, turning back towards me.

"You just don't know when to quit, do you? Look at you, a broken wreck. You lost the moment you decided to fuck with me. You're not on my level. Just accept it and die."

My vortex gun was destroyed. Even if I could get to them fast enough, the stunner and plasma rifle could not be trusted to work. More importantly, I couldn't trust the stunner wouldn't trip the dead man's switch she had claimed to have, detonating everything. I had no idea where Lisa was— that was a risk I couldn't take. I was out of options, and out of time. Bakuda entered my line of sight, just beyond the wrecked jeep. She lifted the grenade launcher.

What a feeble end. A joke.

A momentary blur from the left was the only warning, my cold-deadened mind only truly processing the imagery after the fact. A giant quadrupedal monster of raw muscle and jagged bone slammed directly into Bakuda. I heard a distorted scream as she was carried out of sight, followed by an explosion. Then another, and another. Then nothing.

Just the slow popping of cooling ice, and the faint sound of burning in the distance.

I laboriously dragged myself forward, over the wreckage and out of the shattered storage locker. Looking around, I couldn't see anyone— not Bakuda, the monster, the Undersiders…

I sat up with some difficulty, my back to the rear of the jeep.

My body temperature wasn't dropping anymore, which was good. The Hyperbright morph normally produced an obscene amount of heat, dispersed by the fins on my head. This had likely saved my life. While my equipment was frozen solid and my body was near-hypothermic, my brain had been only borderline. Even a minute longer in that locker-turned-freezer and I would have started suffering from mental effects not dissimilar to intoxication.

Not the time to think about that.

 _Sia, call Lisa._

[Opening cellular communication with contact: Lisa… Connected.]

"Kind of busy," Lisa said. I heard muffled cursing in the background.

"I'm familiar with the feeling," I said roughly. "Where's Bakuda?"

"She's gone," she said. "She melted Bitch's dogs, but after getting her left arm chewed on and some broken ribs she decided to cut her losses. We didn't chase her because she still had one arm and grenades— not worth getting in strike range, and not worth cornering the crazy bitch. She could've gone full kamikaze."

"Please don't get cornered by a mad bomber in the future. I have a limited supply of bones."

"Bones? Oh, shit, you're hurt. I thought your armor would… another bomb. Okay. Fuck. We're all fucked up, so I'm calling the boss for a ride. We'll have them drive in and pick you up too."

"No," I rejected. I didn't trust Coil on the best of days. I sure as hell didn't trust him as a cripple.

"What? No, look, I know you and Coil don't get along but if you're—"

"I'll be fine. Don't worry," I interrupted. "I'll see you later."

The line was quiet, broken only by stray noise from her end. Muffled cursing.

"...Fine," she said curtly. "Whatever."

[Connection closed.]

— — —

I had Sia retask drones usually responsible for delivering PHO orders to pick me up. I hadn't made them for this, but as they were just a blueprint from my database, multi-drone lifts were there in the design and the software. Explosions in the distance made for tension during the flight, but in the end I made it the few miles home without incident. Hab automechs carried me inside.

I had made a terrible mistake.

My plan for the foreseeable future had been to stay in my base. I spent almost all fabrication time on upgrading said fabricators, racing my way to the finish line. After all, if I was staying in my base, then there was no need for luxuries, like the hideously complex healing vat.

That was clearly no longer the case, if it ever was. Needless to say, the industrial fabber was already working on one.

A brief check of current news indicated that Bakuda had not simply attacked only the Undersiders. There were bombs going off all over the city. Power networks, public and private schools, libraries, transportation networks on road, rail, and air… the entire city was in chaos. Dozens were dead, and that was only what had been verified so far.

All a distraction. Something to strain government response to the limit. Meanwhile, the teleporter Oni Lee attacked the Protectorate headquarters out in the bay. The result was a broken force field, courtesy of her strange, physics-breaking bombs, and the ABB leader Lung broken out of prison.

Whatever unwritten rules governed parahuman politics, this city was being strained to a breaking point. I'd tried to stay out of things.

It was clear that was no longer an option.

Not unless I was willing to write off Lisa; she would no doubt be hip deep in the mess. Even if I did wash my hands of the girl, I was already going to be on Bakuda's shit list, and Coil was a time bomb waiting to explode.

The gatecrashing armor I had been wearing when I arrived on this Earth wasn't going to cut it anymore. On Earth Bet, there were no heavy hitters to guard my back. Even Bitch of the Undersiders was really a glass cannon, as her capture by Bakuda proved.

Of course, even as I queued heavier combat armor, I knew it wasn't really a solution. Bakuda's bombs had pounded home the lesson that tinkertech was an outside context problem. I could not rely on armor, because that armor was built on basic assumptions about physics.

Assumptions I could no longer trust to hold.

Dodging… I simply wasn't some amazing fighter. It was untenable.

An automech trundled past, and I glanced at it. Perhaps…

Drones. Even if they are outright destroyed, the only thing lost is a machine.

With a thought, I opened the blueprint for the 'Steel' model synthetic morph. I removed the nuclear RTG immediately. Then I turned to the battery.

With regret, I deleted the momentum battery, replacing it with a mid-range carbon-germanium-lithium chemical hybrid. I downgraded servos, removed the cosmetic articulation, dropped redundancies...

I finished by removing the other part that monopolized fab time: the high-quality cyberbrain. I stuck the budget cyberbrain from a mass-market case morph in instead. It could still host an ego, if it came to it— it just did so emulated with a cruddy 120 terabytes of RAM rather than proper FPGAs. More than enough for forks of my muse.

By the time I was done, the manufacturing time had tanked. I queued five; that was all I could afford, and frankly? At this point, I didn't expect to get them all done before _something_ happened.

— — —


	6. CH5 - Interlude: Somer's Rock

CH5 - Interlude: Somer's Rock

— — —

" _You forget what you want to remember, and you remember what you want to forget." - The Road_

— — —

Her head wasn't in the game.

"...Puckered, juicy assholes, all of you…"

This meeting was important, but all she could think about was that she hadn't spoken to Henry— Epsilon— in a week.

Sure, she could have called, or showed up, but she was mad at him. He just barged in for her, then blew off having broken bones, told her to just _leave_. Asshole.

That's what he wanted, so she did just that. Served him right. Except she couldn't help but worry.

"...You could call us nomadic…"

She knew he was alive, because Coil was still pissy, still asked about him. She lied, saying Epsilon wasn't returning her calls.

Calling him would be like losing, so she waited. And waited. Between that, keeping Taylor in good spirits, all the drama with the ABB… suddenly a week was gone, there was a big meeting, and he still hadn't _fucking_ called.

"...Please, continue as if I wasn't here…"

Not that she would admit to being worried, because _clearly_ he didn't see any problem. Coming in like he did, just as her power was 'helpfully' suggesting that kid was most likely to shoot _her_ —

It didn't matter. There had to be something disgusting about him. There was something disgusting about everyone.

Him… her power just hadn't gotten around to shoving it in her face yet. Because he was fucking weird. He was way too old anyway.

When it did, this wouldn't bother her anymore.

Fuck.

"That should be everyone. Seems..."

Abruptly, everyone stopped talking.

Looking up, she saw what had everyone quiet.

It stood over eight feet tall. Matte black.

Every inch was solid metal, parts fitting together seamlessly, with only the faintest of hairline cracks to show that they weren't a single piece. It didn't even have a faceplate. The only apparent exception were vents on the forearms and legs, filled with a dark mesh, and small holes placed around each limb.

Over the body was a thick, baggy vest, made of the same dark mesh, covered in pouches.

 _No seams, no screws; tinkertech. Design is perfectly symmetrical; low Kolmogorov complexity; appearance was material design factor. Professional design; commercial design; tint is dark blue; surface is matted; stealth design. Military design. Width of joints exceeds 15 inches, protrudes from surface. Servos. Power armor. Meshed vents inconsistent with design methodology; deception. Not weak points. Holes are functional; Mesh vent looks like air intake; like air outtake holes are for air_

She closed her eyes and pinched her nose. Took a breath. Looked again.

The imposing machine walked into the pub, oddly silent save for the tortured groans of the floor. It held in it's right hand a equally oversized weapon, a thick, blocky gun of some kind. From the back came a thick cable weaved of that same black mesh, which ran somewhere behind the suit.

 _Power cable. Thickness is necessary. Cable is superconductive; large diameter indicates current would exceed a smaller cable's critical magnetic threshold. Observable barrel size, interior structures suboptimal for solid kinetic weapon. Energy weapon._

"It seems we have another visitor," Coil said finally. "Or rather, a resident of our city. Epsilon, I presume?"

Lisa felt a rush of anger. Coil wasn't supposed to solve a puzzle before her. Now that he'd raised the possibility, it seemed obvious— even ignoring the strange familiarity of the tinkertech, who else would make a picture-perfect suit of power armor that looked like it just rolled off a military assembly line? It looked more pristine than Armsmaster's, even, and she'd swear that guy lovingly polished his every night.

"You are correct," a dull, synthetic voice said. The deep bass vibrated her chair.

"I'd offer a seat, but I don't think the chair would survive it," Coil said.

"Are you fucking kidding me?" Skidmark exploded. "You assholes think the Merchants are gonna just sit over here while some fucking nobody gets offered—"

He went silent as the bulky weapon in Henry's— Epsilon's— hand was lifted slightly, a rising, bone deep hum vibrating through the pub.

"Tattletale was kind enough to explain the unwritten rules to me," the monotone voice uttered. "But I am… flawed. Very proud. I don't appreciate your tone."

Skidmark stared at the humming barrel, and sat back down. The humming faded out.

"...Yes," Kaiser said after a moment. "This meeting _is_ under a truce. Though I can understand feeling… insulted." His tone was condescending, as he nodded toward Skidmark. Despite the fury on his face, the Merchant leader stayed silent.

"I believe this is everyone," Coil said. "Excepting Lung, but I don't think anyone here is surprised by that."

"Naturally. The ABB is the problem, after all," Kaiser replied.

"Yes. Thirty eight confirmed…"

They nattered on, more or less following the threads Coil had either predicted or planted. She couldn't bring herself to care. So long as it was all to script, she was just here as a ornament, Grue being the leader, and all that.

Faultline piped in, making a clumsy effort to sound witty. Not that it worked. Mostly, it was just Coil regurgitating the facts and the Kaiser nodding along like an idiot. Followed by Grue sharing the video.

A show of strength. The video showed everything, from how batshit crazy Bakuda was right up to Park Jihoo melting, and then Epsilon smashing the crowd. It didn't really capture anything bad, and Epsilon's imposing appearance today would only help. The Undersiders faced the crazy bomber, got away perfectly fine, and Epsilon helped them do it.

Okay, maybe Epsilon crashing the party wasn't a plus for their reputation, but when the alternative was being _dead_ , you took what you could get.

Other than Faultline trying to pussy out, everyone agreed to a truce, to cooperate until the ABB were dealt with.

Everything went as Coil predicted. Except, of course, for Henry showing up here.

After not calling her even once. Too busy building tinker bullshit to let her know he was _alive_ , apparently.

"I'll be there," Epsilon said.

She blinked, realizing the meeting was wrapping up. Everyone at the table was shaking hands. Oh well, it wasn't important— she was just here to prove the Undersiders were untouched, not to talk. Grue insisted her talking was a bad idea.

This was all a formality, anyway, they were going to be cooperating—

"I've got a complaint," Hookwolf interjected, and everything went off the rails, because Rachel was… Rachel.

Grue managed to straighten things out, but it was just reminder of how fucked up everyone in the Undersiders was. They weren't that bad— really— but it was in her face. Every day.

It was why she kept retreating to Henry's. The robots weren't 'doing it for their family' while secretly taking the easy way out— maybe it was hypocritical to blame Brian when she wasn't joining the Wards either, but it reminded her of her parents. Everything was clean, _perfectly_ clean. No analysis of sociopath-boy's pizza grease being jammed in her face, only to trail off into incoherent speculation on his maybe-rape-orgies. Silence, not Rachel's all too human willful stupidity compounded by bullshit dog-logic. Like the stellar episode derailing the meeting today.

Taylor was sweet, when she wasn't plotting to betray them, or angsting over how _she_ was betrayed— hypocritical, much?— or not concerning herself with little details like her possible _death_. De facto suicidal, in other words.

Lisa suppressed a shudder.

She wasn't being fair, of course. They were good people, good enough. That was just the problem. All the little things she was forced to know added up.

Not their fault. She didn't even see stuff like that most of the time. But one slip and bam, reminded Brian would rather be a thug than suffer under government red tape, even for his sister. Boom, Alec is thinking it's a shame she won't put out. Rachel thinks she's weak, just plain can't seem to get how powerful being smart is. Oh, and a side of migraine with all that, thank you very fucking much.

The robots weren't being selfish, or thinking like dogs, or completely fucking apathetic. There wasn't even a speck of dirt to set off her power— there was only so much it could say about identical, immaculate, perfectly formed carbon nanotube panels. The only sound the even, unwavering humming of a few machines. Easy to block, too, because there was even bullshit tinkertech soundproofing between rooms.

And for some reason she still hadn't figured out, she couldn't pick up much from Henry. It was nice, to not know the nasty side of someone's thoughts within five minutes of meeting them.

Even if he was being an asshole.

Even if she didn't believe it would last.

— — —

/AN: A little tattleturkey POV. Skidmark is a canon pussy in this meeting so this is totally consistent for him k


	7. CH6 - Transition

CH6 - Transition

— — —

" _It would be poetic – albeit deeply frustrating – were it ultimately to prove that the one thing the human mind is incapable of comprehending is itself. An answer must be out there somewhere. And finding it matters: indeed, one could argue that nothing else could ever matter more. [...] Nor that, were we to stumble on a solution to the Hard Problem, on some distant shore where neuroscience meets philosophy, we would even recognise that we'd found it." - Oliver Burkeman_

— — —

"This is incredible," she breathed, running her fingers across the surface of the organoweave. "What is it?"

"Organoweave. High-modulus polyethylene thermoplastic, aramid fibers, strategic carbon nanotubing, threads of various organometallics and memory metals. The exact composition can vary depending on the desired properties. That one... is closer to a silk texture."

The fabric lifted from her hand, twisting in the air in front of her. She played with it a while longer, before turning to me. "So you said you had customers lined up?"

"That depends. You're fine with the neutral angle? Both heroes and villains."

She stood silently. Looked at the fabric in her hand, and glanced again around the impromptu showroom in my base. She sighed. "As long as it's discreet, and my role is just the art. Explicitly. I'm not arming criminals if I'm just making things look good…"

She looked at me. "And this place. They say never attack a tinker in their workshop. With the bombings… I'd expect to be accommodated. If it came to that."

"Absolutely," I said. "You'd be welcome here. As far as discretion, you'd be listed as a fashion consultant, artistic input… something like that."

"And you were serious about a fifty fifty split?" she confirmed.

"...Okay." She sounded uncertain, so I stayed silent. "Okay."

"I have something lined up today, actually— if you need time to think about things, I can do this as I have before, or you can sit in…"

"Watching can't hurt," she said.

"Great," I said, smiling. "They're arriving any time now— you're familiar with the Undersiders?"

"Villains." There was a faint edge of distaste, but she didn't move.

There was a chime, and even from in here the sound of the door sliding could be heard.

"Relax," I said to Parian. "It's no big deal. You don't have to do a thing; they aren't expecting you at all. Nobody is going to start anything in my workshop."

The tension started to bleed out of her frame, just as Lisa stepped through the door.

I'd seen them all in photographs, but it wasn't the same as a first impression. It went without saying I wasn't looking closely during the fight with Bakuda.

Lisa was clad in a skintight outfit of black and lavender, her long hair hanging loose. Unlike myself, there was no saving grace in the form of armor plating. The clinging fabric showed absolutely everything. A belt was slung diagonally across her hips; I could see various items tucked in the pouches.

She came in, laughing about something.

A well built man followed her in, wearing thick motorcycle leathers and a skull-shaped helmet. Vents in the helmet emitted streams of black mist.

"This is Grue," Lisa said. Grue stuck out his hand, and I shook it.

Regent wore a simple white mask, reminiscent of a carnival. The rest was just a renaissance type costume, more what I'd expect to see at a convention than for a fight. A cheap scepter was being spun lightly in one hand.

It was a lie. A brief burst of terahertz radiation had already revealed hidden mesh armor, and a taser mechanism in the scepter.

Bitch… had no costume at all. A cheap halloween rottweiler mask was the only token of compliance. Otherwise, it was just a skirt, boots, and a torn shirt. I wasn't impressed.

Lisa introduced them, though with only one guy and girl left I had already guessed. Regent seemed indifferent, but Bitch was scowling, choosing to stay standing even when the rest sat down.

"Most of us have spoken already. For those that don't know, my name is Epsilon. Henry Svanta, to friends." Giving my name seemed to surprise them, especially Parian.

"To be clear, I'm giving you my name for a reason. Costume work means seeing you outside your costume, or at least it does if you want it done right. Even if you use a changing room, you don't really know no one can see. Consider it a token of my sincerity about keeping the identities of my customers a secret."

"Still seems a bit dangerous," Grue said, his voice reverberating strangely.

"To be fair," I said, gesturing toward my heat fins, "I don't have as much of a secret identity as others might. But it is what I can do." I shrugged.

"And you have Parian here, I see?" There was an edge to Lisa's usual tone.

"I thought she might be able to help me with the artistic aspects. Of course, that's up to her."

I turned to Parian. She was silent for a moment, before she spoke. "I think that's fine."

"Great," I said, smiling. A holographic projector in the table lit up. With a thought, a photogrammetically generated model of Grue sprung up in miniature. A moment later, a stock idle animation started playing on it.

"I'd originally intended to push a redesign of your costumes, as in my opinion they should be armor first." I inclined my head to Grue and Regent. "But given the recent insanity, I'm thinking we should skip to just cloning your current designs, with better materials and smartmatter armor applied. ...As much as Tattletale will tolerate, anyway."

"From the way you looked at me coming in here, I don't think you're complaining," she retorted.

I glanced over them, stopping on Bitch. I paused.

"I don't know what to do with Bitch."

She stared at me resentfully.

"Nothing," Tattletale said.

"She needs to wear something," Grue interjected. "Especially after getting kidnapped."

"This is stupid," Bitch said. "Can you armor my dogs?"

"...No," I said slowly. "I don't fully understand what your power is doing, but I can't make armor that gets bigger. I could make partial armor, like horse armor, but even that would require a predictable size and would need to be put on after they were bulked up."

Bitch snorted, then turned away, her stance dismissive.

"Okay," I said. "Those of you who actually _want_ armor, please remove helmets and accessories so I can get a good scan of the color and texture of your bodysuits or underlayers…"

— — —

Organoweave, and it's various design suites, was the last answer to clothing design. Getting that into the hands of Parian was a bit harder, as the software had been refined for nearly a century for mental interfaces and muses, but I had a workaround for that.

Ectos could do everything basic mesh inserts could. Formatted as tablet-screens of various sizes and a fork of Sia loaded, actively interpreting voice, gestures, etc into the proper commands, it didn't take long for Parian to get the hang of it. The suite calculated the optimal material composites for outfits across every inch of the human body, and a plugin allowed armor like smartmatter to be applied or erased at will, the result rendered holographically in real time.

If anything, the design software had Parian more hooked than the cloth ever could.

We'd settled the updated designs for everyone except Bitch within an hour. Grue said something about having to have a talk with her, but I didn't really care.

"So when do I get a bullshit AI tablet," Lisa said, slouching insolently across a couch. The other Undersiders had already left. Parian was sitting at the table, glancing at Lisa occasionally while playing with the program.

"Should you?" I said.

"Yes!"

"Very convincing argument."

She looked at me, her face stormy, before suddenly exploding. "Why didn't you call me after the fight!"

I sighed. "Because I don't trust Coil." I didn't say anything more, with Parian in the room, but I didn't need to.

"You thought— but— ugh!" Lisa stood up. "I…" She went silent, then just walked out. I didn't move.

I would not bend for her. She would have to decide for herself what was important, and act accordingly.

"...That was intense," Parian said, her tone tentative. I looked at her and shrugged. "Tattletale is still learning that sometimes you can't have everything."

"I see," she said unconvincingly. "...Did you make this program?"

"...Yes," I said, for lack of a better answer. "Nothing like it exists anywhere else."

She sighed, and leaned back, working her shoulders. "With these scanning modes and everything else... masks are pointless." She reached up, and pulled off her mask, revealing a dark face. Middle eastern, not african. She pulled off the metal frame the mask had rested on, wincing, then gave a sigh of relief.

"We don't all have a program that can create the perfect supports for any occasion," she said, glancing at me almost nervously.

"I understand," I said. She relaxed, pulling the wig off to reveal black hair, pinned up in such a way as to be completely obscured. She unpinned it and let her arms drop.

"I expect the same courtesy you offered the Undersiders," she said after a moment.

"Of course," I responded. "You're planning a big reveal later on, I think it was?"

"Yes," she said. "Standing out from the crowd as a new designer is difficult. Much more difficult than as a cape. I'm going to use my following as Parian to get around that, so my designs get real consideration from the start."

"It's a good plan," I said. "You'll be accused of 'cheating' at every turn, of course— your competition will latch onto any excuse to trivialize your accomplishments."

The room was quiet.

"...I know," she finally said, her voice tired. "...But they'll do that anyway."

— — —

The healing vat was the bleeding edge of modern design. Or it was supposed to be.

The machine I ended up fabricating was a crude model, the pipe pistol or AK-47 to the M16, to use the weaponry of this time for an analogy. Pipe pistols or even an AK could be made by hand or by pressing steel, where the M16 required more advanced manufacturing processes. For this, 'advanced' meant 'slower'.

I had needed to fix my body immediately, however. I ended up printing a pelvic and thigh bone, replacing them— which was exactly as gruesome, and crudely done, as it sounded— then running an IV of the same soup a healing vat would use, supercharging my medichines to regenerate and correct the rest of the damage. That was enough to get back on my feet before the meeting.

The pared down healing vat, and an ego bridge were re-queued afterward, and it was only today, three days after the meeting at Somers' Rock, that they were ready.

Coil's deliveries had stopped a few days after fighting Bakuda, a few days after I stopped taking calls. After the meeting, the missed calls stopped completely.

The silence… I was sure it was just that which came before a storm.

I was now faced with a more daunting issue.

As an async, I couldn't live indefinitely as a infomorph, data in the mesh. In time I'd go insane, or worse. But to create a biomorph from scratch took months.

Before the Fall, it was if anything convenient. Exowombs were good enough, just scale it up. Don't make it faster, just make more. One more barrier against challengers to the hypercorps.

After… who had the skill, and the time, and the will to come up with a new process to print the entire body without error? This organ needs that organ needs… better to just accel-grow from an embryo. It works. Somebody could design a better way, maybe, but if they did it never reached me. The powers in transhuman space wouldn't like it anyhow. Between that, the scarcity of those who could do it, and the ease of getting bodies for those same kind of people… well. I'd never know the real answer.

All I knew was that if I wanted a spare body I could use, without _issues_ , I'd have to wait months… or steal someone else's. Distasteful.

— — —

The body was dragged, limply, into the room, and the robot dumped it into the vat. The ego bridge was already attached to the system. The lid closed, and it began installing the basic slew of mods.

Basic biomods, a slew of virii splicing in genetic tweaks for healing speed, some regeneration, disease resistance, slowed aging, reduced sleep requirements, a general immunity to depression, shock, allergies… basic fixes.

Mesh inserts, the cybernetic brain implants and the weave throughout the neural tissue that enabled the most critical parts of transhuman life. Backups, skillsofts, augmented reality, the computational substrate for muses and other quality-of-life software, network connectivity, medical sensors… as with biomods, it was a laundry list of small but important things.

The cortical stack. The tiny synthetic diamond shell that ensured immortality itself. A continuous backup of everything that defines a person, repeated every second, over 86,000 times a day.

For all that, the body was still a flat, an unspliced, standard human. It was in every way inferior to even the crudest of cyborgs or robot cases. It's only virtue was the purely biological brain, that which an async required to pretend at sanity.

Hopefully, this contingency would never be needed. Hopefully, I could release it back onto the street, the original mind restored into this generously refurbished shell.

Only time would tell.

— — —


	8. CH7 - Blowtorch

CH7 - Blowtorch

— — —

" _We cast a shadow on something wherever we stand, and it is no good moving from place to place to save things; because the shadow always follows. Choose a place where you won't do harm - yes, choose a place where you won't do very much harm, and stand in it for all you are worth, facing the sunshine." - A Room With A View, E.M. Forster_

— — —

"This is… too easy."

I looked up. Parian— Sabah, was sitting on one end of the couch, the ecto tablets scattered across it beside a bookbag. Her classes were shut down right now due to the bombings, and she had been splitting her attention between her books and doing outfit mockups for people on PHO.

"What do you mean?" I asked.

"It's almost easier just to make a design with your program than it is to sketch it on paper," she said. "I describe things out loud, make a few adjustments… and then it's almost done, it fills in all the details and if I wanted to it would come out of your printing machine, complete." She seemed torn between awe and frustration.

I shrugged. "Just don't tell the customer."

"Hah. But no, I feel like I'm not even doing anything."

"That's an illusion," I said. "You say a 'few adjustments'... if I used that program, I wouldn't even know what to tell it, I can't make art. Just because it is easy to get the vision in your head into the computer doesn't mean that everything you see isn't yours— all it did was make logical conclusions based on facts about the human body and cloth and so on."

She sighed. "I suppose. I think… I enjoyed the crafting as much as the design. But…"

Oh. Her powers.

Damn.

"There's a value to hand crafting," I started, thinking. "Not just in that you can honestly claim that the product is handmade. You can do amazing work on-the-fly. While my software is no doubt superior for designing _protection_ , things like mathematical placement of nanotubes and metallics are not as important in civilian clothing. Plus, judging by your performances? I bet you're even faster than the printer at turning bolts of cloth into outfits. So you just need to print all the materials you might use as bolts…"

"Yes," Sabah said, her voice brightening a bit. "I can just use the program for bodysuits, supports, and such things, and do the rest as I have before."

I went silent, the only sound for a few minutes Sabah's voice as she instructed the tablets.

"—Henry?"

"Oh, sorry, what?"

"How do you use this program?"

I gave her a confused look.

"I mean… when you use it, you don't have to talk or gesture," Sabah clarified. "Nor anything else in here."

I thought. I could lie, but… I don't like to lie. Besides, it was Sabah.

"Mental control," I said simply. Her eyebrows went up. "I see… is it easier that way?"

"...Yes. But it involves brain implants."

"Oh."

A ping on my entoptics interrupted the conversation. "Tattletale is here, with… a new friend."

Sabah frowned. "Ah. Can you hold them up a moment?" She pulled her porcelain mask out of her bag, and a stream of cloth, thread, and needles flew out behind it. She stepped into a side room, and shut the simple sliding door.

Not a minute later, Lisa stepped inside, trailed by a figure I vaguely recognized from the storage facility.

Insect theme - Undersider - controls bugs. The girl Lisa mentioned?

"You must be the woman who defeated Lung," I said. Flattery never hurt anyone.

"Yeah." The mask made it hard to tell, but she didn't seem pleased by the recognition.

"Yep! This is Skitter," Lisa said cheerfully. "She was too shy to come with for the costume stuff last time, but she agreed to come by now."

"I don't think it's necessary," Skitter said. "I have more armor than you do, and my silk is bulletproof."

"Bulletproof silk?" I said in confusion.

"It's spider silk."

This didn't make sense— silk was certainly strong, but the impact energy…

"Well," I started, then stopped. "I'm not familiar with spider silk, but even if that armor paneling you have works, that doesn't mean there isn't anything better. There wouldn't be much point to Tinkers if they couldn't make things better."

Skitter stood silently, her expression hidden behind her mask. The armor panels she had were somewhat disturbing. Made of insect corpses? Any ablative or force distribution properties they had were unoptimized at best, the angles didn't maximize deflection and the surfaces encouraged gouging if they did…

I shook myself loose.

"I guess—"

As she started to speak, the sliding door opened, and Parian stepped back into the room.

"What, you just keep Parian in your closet?" Lisa said.

"Who else is here?" Skitter asked.

"Just me and Parian," I said.

"Hello," Sabah said delicately, stepping over and sitting back on the couch. She didn't seem as tense these days.

Lisa, on the other hand…

"...Yeah, he's got a _thing_ going on with Parian," she said blithely, causing Sabah to go still.

"Totally professional, right, Parian?" she needled.

"Erm…"

"Tattletale?" Skitter sounded confused. Alarmed?

Lisa looked at Skitter. "Sorry, just messing around," she said quickly.

"Well," I interrupted. "If I understand correctly, Tattletale thinks you could use better armor, and you don't."

"Yes," Skitter said.

"Okay. While you've clearly put a lot of work into your costume, I think that if nothing else, you would benefit from smartmatter where you currently use, ah, insects. Think reactive armor, more flexible normally but stiffening and spreading impact forces when hit. It is smoother, so it can actually deflect projectiles without them catching on anything. This avoids the absorbing of unnecessary energy or having caught material torn loose."

She was silent for a minute.

"...That makes sense," she allowed. "So what do we need to do?"

— — —

"Hey. Hey, asshole."

"...What?" Teijo opened his eyes blearily. "The fuck you want, Song-Min?"

"The spotter didn't check in."

"...Isn't the spotter Takeo? He is just lazy, why are you—"

Noise, light, and pain blotted everything out, and Teijo opened his eyes to see clouds of dust, his ears ringing.

"—It's an attack! An atta—"

A brief, deep vibration was the only warning, followed by a loud explosion, splintered wood shooting through the air silently as Teijo shimmied backwards across the floor.

Fuck, what, fuck. He should… he should play dead. Just… until he saw the enemy.

He went limp, eyes straining to see between his lashes.

 _Thump. Thump._

Around the corner it came, a figure. Metal. Armor?

It had no face.

Without even pausing, its left arm snapped up, pointing a pistol at him.

The last thing he saw was a flash of light.

— — —

It wouldn't be long now.

Coil's proposal, according to Lisa, was to mix up the members of each strike group, thus preventing a betrayal through 'hostages'. Not that he reached out to me, and not that it would help me at all.

I'd help mop this mess up as I saw fit.

Not out of any sense of moral superiority— although the bombings offended me simply for being a pointless terror attack— but because of what I had seen.

I'd walked through town, witnessed the bubbles of distorted time, firestorms, glassified buildings…

Bakuda was bullshit. Useful bullshit. By any measure, she deserved whatever she got. If my drones managed to find her…

I was curious to see how the neurology and ego of parahumans diverged from that of a normal human. The exsurgent virus was nearly impossible to separate from a mind, more blind editing and luck than a reliable process, and even if you succeeded you wouldn't understand: why _those_ parts? You _definitely_ wouldn't have the slightest explanations as to _how_.

The literature of Earth Bet suggested a much greater understanding of parahuman brain structures, while simultaneously explaining nothing. It was probably deception, but I could hope.

And, well, over-the-top physics-breaking bombs. You couldn't _buy_ that kind of tinkertech. I'd tried.

My squad of Steel-lite drones was smashing ABB safehouses, locations courtesy of Lisa. Not that I trusted her to deliver the 'good' targets, but that was okay. The dead-man's switch meant that no one should kill Bakuda.

In the meantime, I had another problem.

The Number Man had accounts in place for me, but I still needed to find a supplier. Right now, if I used up the stocks from Coil, I would be placed in a very awkward position. Rare earth elements didn't grow on trees.

I'd reached out to the Toybox, but they were leery. Something had them spooked, and they were only interested in cash, nothing I could fab. They weren't interested in playing middleman and they didn't trust me with the identities of their suppliers— understandable, but…

Annoying.

I'd sent inquiries out to commercial suppliers, but those responses would take longer. I'd been digging out blueprints of fluid mining systems in the meantime. They should work on seawater just as well.

Everything came back to time, and how there wasn't enough.

— — —

"Thanks to a concerted effort by members of Brockton Bay's Wards and Protectorate teams, the local gang, the 'ABB', or Azn Bad Boys, has fallen."

"The heroes of the hour are the young members of the Wards, Clockblocker and Vista, who played a pivotal role in managing a crisis with a _superbomb_ …"

I listened to the news channel with a mild sense of disbelief. Nine thousand kilotons, in a bomb made from household materials?

And, of course, that put Bakuda in the hands of the Protectorate. Bad and good: she wouldn't be executed by a gung-ho gang leader, but she was beyond my reach… unless…

"Sometimes I wish my family had settled in a different city," Sabah said. She was the reason for the news channel playing here in the first place; if it was just me, I'd be reading a condensed list compiled by Sia every morning, or in the case of something like this would be notified by her at an appropriate moment.

She had acted strangely awkward after Lisa's comment, but it went away soon enough. Coming here to study and work became a regular thing for her. I suspected she didn't have a good social circle. Perhaps her classmates didn't agree with her serious attitude and dedication to things that actually mattered. That, and she really didn't deal well with stress. I imagined the social gymnastics of college girls had plenty of that.

Fortunately, Lisa was either busy, didn't want to be around Sabah, or she was still having some mysterious teenage tiff about how I ought to be calling her. I was being charitable and assuming she was busy.

"Why?" I asked.

"This isn't a good time for Brockton Bay, but it has not been good for a long time," she said. "Perhaps they could not have known, and did not have unlimited choice in any case— we immigrated— but I wonder sometimes, what it would have been like to grow up in New York, or Boston…"

"Feeling a bit lost without your classes?"

"Not so much, thanks to our business," she said, giving me a brief smile. "I wouldn't have wanted to do performances, so I would have been stewing in my room… I didn't have an online business set up like this. Nor, I think, would my work have been as popular alone. The exotic materials make it something more than just excellent sewing done by a parahuman."

"The materials might attract the shallow, but it wouldn't work without your skills," I said simply. She smiled, and turned back to her textbook.

[Opening cellular communication with contact: Lisa… Ringing… Connected.]

"What's up," Lisa said.

"I need a favor," I transmitted.

"Oh?" she said with a lilt. "What does the obnoxiously overpowered tinker need from me? The ABB is done, and you pretty much destroyed all the little safehouses already…"

"What's going to happen to Bakuda?"

"Heh. They're going to drive a truck at 90 miles an hour right through all the red tape and straight to the Birdcage," she said. "No delays, triple guard, triple everything… the PRT is not going to have any more egg on their face. Same for Lung, hell, they'll probably be on the same bus."

I frowned.

"How much detail can you get me?"

"...Please tell me you're joking."

— — —


	9. CH8 - Sunk Cost

CH8 - Sunk Cost

— — —

" _Have you ever sailed across an ocean, Donald? On a sailboat, surrounded by sea with no land in sight, without even the possibility of sighting land for days to come? To stand at the helm of your destiny. I want that, one more time. I want to be in the Piazza del Campo in Siena. To feel the surge… as ten racehorses go thundering by. I want another meal in Paris, at L'Ambroisie, at the Place des Vosges. I want another bottle of wine. And then another. I want the warmth of a woman on a cool set of sheets. One more night of jazz at the Vanguard. I want to stand on the summits and smoke Cubans and feel the sun on my face for as long as I can. Walk on the wall again. Climb the tower. Ride the river. Stare at the frescos. I want to sit in the garden and read one more good book. Most of all I want to sleep. I want to sleep like I slept when I was a boy. Give me that. Just one time. That's why I won't allow that punk out there to get the best of me. Let alone the last of me." - Raymond 'Red' Reddington, The Blacklist_

— — —

Going after Bakuda was a bad idea.

I knew that.

But...

In that moment, as my brain struggled under the weight of hypothermia, I felt it so very clearly. The whispers extending forth, lending an answer when I could barely think at all. _Fire the vortex gun_.

Ever since her bomb bypassed my armor, I had the usual impulse to study a mystery, to dissect, to understand. A constant reminder. But her location was unknown. There was time. I managed to push it aside.

That logic couldn't hold anymore.

She was on her way to an impenetrable prison. If I didn't act, she would be gone. It was now or _never_. Other tinkers or their work were just… abstract possibility. The only _certain_ answer to what Bakuda had done was Bakuda herself. I needed to know.

I wanted to know.

Even if I could put it in words for her, I knew Lisa would not understand. She wouldn't help, not until I promised not to put myself at risk.

A difficult problem… but as always, I found a solution.

— — —

[Stukholz-Gemeinschaft industrial fabricator initializing... fabricator online. Peripherals ready. Welcome, user!]

[Blueprint loaded. Loading sub-blueprints… loaded. JIT-compiling high-count identical components to HFMC format macroscale molds. Assembling molds and transient material formatting structures. Template: cast_steel_i76.]

[Molecular printing done. Casting T_wheel_base x 6, T_chain_base x 1152, T_armor_panel x 26… continued in logfile print_ ]

[Macrocasting complete. JIT-compiling high-count identical smartmatter objects to parallelized nanoassembler chambers to fit main fabricator work-volume.]

[Panels complete. Running stutter algorithm. Adding imperfections.]

[Constructing 22,539 miscellaneous small components: see log or expand blueprint in StukholzCAD for full list.]

[Miscellaneous small components complete. Pushing blueprint to available automechs... loaded. Pre-assembly to specified transport volume limits in progress.]

[Assembly completed to limit of transport volume. Rapid-release storage containers configured. Automechs backloaded for finalization. Loading additional cargo from manifest: paneling x 226, ]

In the dead of night, an eighteen wheeler, engine rumbling noisily, rolled up to an abandoned meat packing plant in a dilapidated city. "Walmart, Inc." was painted proudly on the side. It reversed smoothly, down into one of the rusted, filth-ridden truck docks, the trailer aligning precisely with the closed bay door.

Five minutes later, the semi-trailer truck drove away. Silent.

— — —

Lisa could not do it. Not in the time remaining. Not as she was.

I had a fix for that.

A mind-numbing cocktail of transhuman nootropic drugs, dispensed through supercharged nanobandages. A constant stream of medichines to mitigate the side effects. To actively, physically counter and repair brain inflammation. Especially in the corona pollentia, the strange brain lobe that interfaced with her power.

I told her it would help with her migraines, and she agreed. The result was everything I hoped for. For this brief window in time, Lisa used her power without limit. Where before she had to work with only a score of inferences, she could use hundreds in minutes, thousands by the hour. Divining passwords as needed from scraps, without so much as a single dangling hook of an email. Ripping symmetric cipher keys from the ether. Even accounting for the mood-altering effects of the cocktail, she was high on power alone.

It was unfortunate that the diagnostic stream showed the effective limit imposed by the migraines was adapting. Within a matter of hours, Lisa would be just as limited under this mix as she had been without. I almost felt guilty for not telling Lisa that drug-free, she would likely suffer hair-trigger migraines using her power for the next week.

I'd just have to make it up to her.

There was, however, a complication. Lisa identified the route, and it changed. She inferred the new one, and it changed again. Somehow, they knew.

So be it. If I could not know the route, I would simply await their arrival. Unlike the transports, they couldn't switch around the Birdcage.

Mount Assiniboine. One of the highest peaks in the Canadian Rockies. No roads led to this mountain. It was only reachable by six hour hike… or so the public was told. A tunnel entrance opened on the outskirts of Calgary and then traveled over a hundred kilometers sloping _down_ , to somewhere far, far beneath the more than three kilometer tall mountain.

What laid beyond that point was known only by Dragon.

[Vehicles flagged by recursive potential transport flagging heuristics moving toward Calgary entrypoint: Six... Three…. Four... Three. Distance to Calgary entrypoint from staging point: 12 kilometers. Time for flagged vehicles to potentially reach entrypoint: estimated 30 minutes. Intercept window closing.]

— — —

30 minutes to identify the right vehicle, approach, and extract.

The truck started, the high-torque electric motor I had installed beneath the cabin whirring to life in tandem with the original diesel engine. The jury-rigged electromechanical system surged, and the squeal of rubber announced as I began to move.

[Power levels are at 98%.]

I swerved up the highway ramp at 34MPH, the trailer leaning dangerously. The moment I straightened, I dropped any restraint. 45. 55. 65. 75. 85…

At this point the PRT vans further ahead were already reacting, shifting their formation to completely block access to the van in the center. At this distance, the eighteen wheeler blasting radiation like a star, I could clearly detect the human figures restrained within it.

Their efforts were fruitless. The semi carrying 40 tons of dead weight in the back shoved through the PRT vans like bowling pins, slamming them aside into each other and into the guardrails. Four of the vans lost all semblance of control, flipping and coming to a screeching halt on the road.

Engine revving, the truck shot toward the prisoner transport. Side doors slid open on the PRT vans to each side of it, and the masked soldiers in black hung out, held by straps.

Grenade launchers.

They fired. A continuous bombardment, slamming into the semi, quickly reducing the cabin to a flaming ruin.

The burning truck pushed on valiantly, but they continued to fire, and eventually compromised the wheels. The burning hulk slid, tearing a gash into the road, and the distance rapidly grew as the broken vehicle quickly ground to a halt.

That was when the eighteen wheeler detonated. The PRT vans bounced and staggered as the highway heaved. One of the troopers somehow slipped, falling out the door and rolling to a stop on the road. I could imagine the thoughts going through the minds of the other troopers as the blinding light faded to reveal that section of the highway utterly severed, a miniature mushroom cloud forming above the dust clouding the roadway…

And I barreled around and up the last exit ramp at 70MPH, the six tangled-nanotube gecko-grip tires barely holding the carbon-black APC down as I leveled on, driving right at the convoy. The distance less than 200 meters. The long, menacing turret on top lit up, arcs of lightning traveling down the spaced out tines of the barrel. There was a brief, bone-deep vibration.

The superheavy railgun fired.

All the wheels on the right side of the prisoner transport simply vanished, along with a vast strip of the highway. If the damage made any noise, it was lost in the thunderous boom of the weapon itself. The targeted van spun madly even before the glowing-white edge struck the asphalt, bouncing and rolling to a halt. The PRT vans swerved as though to block my way. Erasing one of them from existence in another eruption of light and sound caused the last van to abort, retreating back down the road.

[Power levels at 36%. Warning: PSU No.1 heat levels borderline.]

The carbon-black APC accelerated, swerving around and braking behind the van. The hatch opened and I climbed out, moving immediately to cut through the van door with a plasma cutter.

When the door finally fell away, I saw the three prisoners. Lung, Bakuda, and one more.

[Paige Mcabee, alias: Bad Canary. Master 8. Her power requires her to sing. Low threat.]

Bakuda's mouth was bloody, and in the corner of the van I could see the broken, partially modified remains of a mask. Presumably Canary's, as her mouth was currently free.

Lung was staring at me silently, eyes slit. Bakuda's head hung bonelessly. Canary shifted, letting out a faint moan.

I climbed inside, dragging a thin hose.

"Who do you serve?"

Ignoring Lung, I pointed it at Bakuda. A stream of chemicals burst out, rapidly destroying the containment foam. She finally twitched, sputtering. "Ughh… the fuck?"

After a moment's thought, I did the same to Canary. She pulled her up, blinking slowly.

"Nice job, guy, but we had this under control," Bakuda said suddenly.

I turned to her.

"We are less than twenty minutes away from the Birdcage tunnel. You did not."

With that, I pulled a thick device off my back and shoved it over her head. Her muffled sounds of outrage went silent in seconds.

"Who do you serve?" Lung said again, his tone darker.

I gave him an indifferent glance. He glared suspiciously. I turned back to him, slowly, and gave him the answer that Lisa had given to me.

" _Will you join us?"_ I said in Chinese. He recoiled, his body growing and steaming even as the wrecked sprinkler system sputtered water fitfully. The containment foam began to distort.

I frowned. _"So be it. Suffer your last defeat in this American hell."_ Turning to Canary, I quickly sliced away her remaining restraints. It wasn't part of the plan, but… PRT response was slower than I expected. It might be possible, and if it wasn't… well, I'd already succeeded.

I offered a hand, and after a pause, she took it.

I yanked her forward, and she yelped as I threw her over my shoulder, leaping out of the van as the glowing steel around Lung began to bend to his frenzied movements. I jumped into the APC, and the hatch slammed shut. The countless temperature controlled wafers on the surface of the APC activated, modulating the infrared signature of the vehicle as it soundlessly burst into motion. The grip surface on the tires was nearly shot, but it had served its purpose.

The vehicle flew down the highway. A chemical rocket briefly activated as it reached the smoking crater, and it lurched upwards, shooting across and just making the other side. It swerved around still obstacles and moving cars alike at over 110MPH. Then, reaching a calculated point, it swerved once more, rocket activating, scraping just over the guardrail and disappearing into the trees.

[Modified neuralization device has finished. DNA recorded. Ego (neurodivergent) uploaded successfully. All nanites retracted. Medical warning: Subject has third-degree burns. Run post-script?]

With a thought, the device on Bakuda's head disassembled and then burst into flames, turning into a mass of slag indistinguishable from the rest of the blazing truck. With a roar, Lung finally tore free, bursting out of the burning wreckage, just in time for the approaching flyers— both the Guild and the Protectorate NW— to engage.

— — —

Deep within the wilderness, the APC trundled along its carefully plotted route, as expensive components were removed from the railgun by small automechs. Finally, they retreated into the hull, and the remainder of the gun popped loose, sliding off the APC as it went over the next hill. The APC rode a thin line through tree-choked woods, bounced up onto a dirt road, and briefly stopped, as a shell was slotted into place around the body, and a tarp was fixed into place.

A rusty pickup truck of unclear make continued on down the road.

— — —

/AN: I could have added an obligatory engagement with heroes, but it didn't work out. Mainly because EP tech is unlikely to be able to fight the branch that covers the _Birdcage_ with the limited supply of nonlethal options, so either decimation of Protectorate NW or mission failure. While slaughtering NW was an option, sure, I didn't like it. OTOH I know many if not all the hits Madcap did had no capes, the PRT is dumb about separation of powers, and somebody tampered with Bakuda's arrangements and/or the transport in canon… Another player? Systematic sabotage? BUT WHO IS PHONE


	10. CH9 - Consequence

CH9 - Consequence

— — —

" _Then, as a psychologist, I think you're confusing suicide with self-destruction. Almost none of us commit suicide, and almost all of us self-destruct. In some way, in some part of our lives. We drink, or we smoke, we destabilize the good job... and a happy marriage. But these aren't decisions, they're... they're impulses. In fact, you're probably better equipped to explain this than I am. [...] You're a biologist. Isn't the self-destruction coded into us? Programmed into each [and every] cell?" - Alex Garland's Annihilation_

— — —

The rusty pickup trundled up to the back of my base. It drove down into the truck dock, and as it reached the opening garage door, cables swung out, snapping into place on the front of the pickup. They went taut, and the truck was lifted out of the dock pit, up and through the doorway.

It shut.

Safely within the walls of the base, automechs pulled apart the disguise. The false front of the pickup was removed, and the tarp obscuring the majority of the actual APC pulled away. The hatch opened, and I shook the shoulder of the woman dozing on the bench beside me.

"Come on."

Canary got up slowly, wincing. "I… alright." She followed me into the living area, where another me was sitting on one of the couches in my Hyperbright.

I spoke. "This is the one responsible for your freedom." With that, I turned and walked away, stepping through several sliding doors.

I pulled away my black-visored motorcycle helmet, sitting it on a shelf. I undressed, leaving the garments on the floor.

Stepping over to the healing vat that was the centerpiece of the room, I stepped into it, and laid down. The lid slid shut.

The cold metal of the ego bridge locked into place around my skull. Sometime after that, everything ended.

— — —

I had long since witnessed the XP recording from the entire raid. It wasn't quite the same as being there, but it was enough for now. I would merge with my fork soon enough.

Right now, I was more interested in the bedraggled woman that had just sat down across from me. Her bright yellow hair and feathers hung tangled and matted, stiff from the dried mess of chemicals that had dissolved her prison. Several feathers were snapped. She was a mess, but she looked at me directly. If she had ever been afraid, she had moved beyond it, now.

"So what's—" She coughed. "What's the price?"

An automech crawled into the room with a glass of water, and she automatically took it. Only with it halfway to her mouth did she pause, glancing back at the robot and at me, before continuing the motion. She drank deeply, emptying the entire glass.

"There isn't one," I said.

"You saved me from a lifetime in hell for… nothing?" Her tone was perfectly polite, but for all that, there was an undeniable edge of skepticism.

"I was there to… punish Bakuda," I said. "Since I was already there…"

"Of course," Canary said slowly, staring into the empty water glass. "Of course. But being a fugitive, I'll be in your care, I expect."

"I suppose you are. You're free to leave at any time, though— the door isn't locked."

She gave a weak laugh. "Do you have… a shower I could borrow? Clothes? Maybe some makeup?"

"I'll see what I can do."

— — —

She had only just stepped into the shower when the entrance pinged me. Lisa.

A minute later, there she was, stumbling into the room. She looked like a hot mess, one hand pinching her forehead and the other gripping the wall. "Henryyyy," she growled quietly, her throat rough. Her face was incredibly pale.

"I told you it was experimental," I said quickly.

"Don't care," she snapped. "I'm dying here. Fix it."

"There's nothing I can do. If I give you more, it'll just put off the inevitable. Maybe make it worse."

She made a faint whining noise. "Fuck… did you get what you wanted? The news is full of _bullshit_ and I can't use my _power_ …"

"Bakuda is dead, but I took Canary," I said.

"...Oh god damn it. You… really did kill those troopers. Didn't you."

She paused a moment, still leaning on the wall.

"Knew this was a bad idea, bad idea," she muttered. "While I was high on your crazy drugs I, uh, did some other stuff. Turns out Coil's way nastier than I thought. Which is maybe a good thing since I kindofrobbedhim."

"...What?"

"Most of his money. Gone," she said. "Yeah, dumb, I know. I wasn't exactly _thinking straight_. Since I _still can't_ , I'm feeling a little, um, exposed right now. So I'm just gonna, uh," she gestured toward the other couch, even as she started toward it. She bumped roughly into the coffee table, but managed to trip onto the couch rather than hitting the floor. She swore dully.

I pinched my own forehead.

"Oh," she mumbled from the couch. "You need to move. Coil has been trying to murder you for like a week. 'Ll explain. Later." She dropped her face into the cushion.

"What?" When she didn't respond, I went over and rolled her over. She glared at me blearily. I noticed her eyes were dilated.

"...His power. Two… worlds in parallel. Does different shit in each… drops. One he doesn't like. Remembers… all. You don't. Until… he finds... win." With that, she just stared at me silently, and I let go.

"...Fuck."

I woke my fork still in the vat. A brief communication, and he made his way out to steal another semi truck. This time, at least, he didn't have to get it from a different city.

— — —

I'd run off a pile of common clothes in every color and had them brought to Canary. When she stepped back into the room, she looked a lot better.

The broken feathers had been plucked, and her yellow hair was clean and straight, hanging loosely around her head. Despite her somber attitude, she had chosen bright colors, a loose, lime green top and violet sleeping pants. She paused at the doorway.

"First come first serve?"

The couch she previously inhabited was now taken in its entirety by a silent, face down Lisa.

I shrugged, and gestured toward the other end of mine.

She sat down tentatively, pulling her legs up.

"I need time," she blurted.

I raised an eyebrow.

"All this… the trial. They chained me up, muzzled me…" she trailed off. "...I just… need time."

"Okay."

She glanced at the table, at Parian's tablets.

"Can I…"

"No, but I can get you one," I said.

"Okay. Yeah." She shifted. "I feel like I'm asking you for a lot. But you brought me here, and you obviously had those clothes prepared in advance, and, I don't know… and now I'm rambling. Sorry."

"Don't worry about it," I said. "You're feeling lost at sea right now, I imagine. I think you just need to rest. In case it wasn't clear, the bedroom attached to that bathroom is yours."

"Yeah. Yeah, rest." She stood up, and paused, glancing at the tablets again.

I sighed, and picked one up. With a thought, I backed it up and reformatted it. "One second."

I'd needed driver analogues for the local operating systems for a few of the devices I sold on PHO, so it was only a moment to adjust them for this. The tablet flickered, then lit up with the Windows logo.

"Here." I offered it to her, and she accepted it.

"Thanks. I'm just gonna go... sleep. Okay?" She sounded uncertain.

"Alright."

She made her way out of the room, pausing to glance back at me briefly as she passed through the door.

Then she was gone.

Now I just needed to figure out what the hell I was supposed to do about Coil and the messed up girl on my couch. Or Parian, when she came back by and I had two more suspicious women here than I expected to have. And again, the sudden revelation that Coil's silence was probably _constant active murder attempts._ And what he was going to do when he realized his money and Lisa were both missing.

...Fuck.

— — —

/AN: Funny thing is Tattleturkey is (probably?) more aware there in her head than it appears at the end, she just hardly has the energy or will to move her mouth. Words are like moving a mountain. It's impossible to explain unless you've been there? Hopefully you haven't!


	11. CH10 - Interlude: Canary

CH10 - Interlude: Canary

— — —

" _It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not." - Andre Gide, Autumn Leaves_

" _Born too late to explore the world. Born too early to explore the universe. Born just in time to listen to shitty trap music and play with fidget spinners._ " _\- Youtube_

" _In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on." - Robert Frost_

— — —

She was the only daughter of the largest stakeholder for the Infiniton Industrial' semiconductor fabrication plant. Her mother died when she was three.

In all the world, she was the only thing he loved.

She did well in school. Not that it mattered, save that her father expected it of her. Even as a child, her allowance would have shocked most. As she grew older, it grew as well. By the time she was fourteen, it was a fact that she would receive every month more than some people made in a year, for the rest of her life.

Her father encouraged her to find something that made her happy. She changed her career goals year to year, sometimes multiple times.

It surprised everyone when she tried writing songs, and proved good at that, too. So good that the only strings her father needed to pull was to get them read. Major artists loved them, sung them, hit the charts.

But it felt hollow.

With every backstage pass, she felt more frustration. As she watched singers swarmed by fans, while she was an accessory. Just in the background.

They didn't care who wrote the song.

Observing her worsening mood, her father suggested singing classes. She tried, harder than she had ever needed to try at anything, but it didn't matter. The talent simply wasn't there.

Success could be synthesized with a phone call, but she didn't want that. How could she, after staring at artists who could actually sing and feeling as she had? It would be a mockery. It wouldn't be real. She wanted to do live performances, experience real, honest, fanatical admiration.

She stayed in a funk for months, before her father came to her with a solution. They called themselves Cauldron. Her father supplied the money. She agreed to an unspecified favor, at a later date.

Bad Canary was born. Though critics and peers disdained her talent as 'parahuman ability', it didn't matter. Fans didn't care about that, any more than they had cared about her when those same artists used her songs. As for her, she knew her singing really was amazing. The means by which she achieved it didn't matter, not really. To spite her critics, she soon stopped plucking her feathers, flaunting her parahuman nature. Her sales only spiked.

She paid off her favor in time. A subtle harmonic while attending some diplomatic function. She didn't miss it when the recent rise in tensions with the CUI faltered and died shortly after.

Then her father died, another tragedy of Behemoth, along with the foundry that represented most of their wealth. Then the Elite started pressing her label, a non-stop barrage of attacks from every angle. Political, financial, even physical, small things at first. They were rebuffed, for now, but the sabotage continued.

Despite her loss and increasing problems, life wasn't bad. _She_ was the star, now. She was loved.

By the year 2011, she was one of the top singers in the United States. The latest attempt to tear her down was some nonsense about her music loosening inhibitions.

It was unfortunate, that she only cared about her ability to sing. Any unusual influence was nothing more than the influence of all good music, just more, surely. She did her best to keep it in check, and that was that.

She didn't know how powerful it was.

And then she told her boyfriend to go fuck himself, and everything went to shit.

— — —

The shower was running, but Paige just stood at the sink, naked, staring into the mirror.

Hopefully there weren't any cameras. Not that she was in any position to argue.

Compared to the horrors inflicted by the PRT… she shuddered..

No lawyer. That government stooge wasn't her lawyer, she refused to give him that. He didn't even talk to her, he barely talked _at_ her. In the beginning, she could at least send him emails— only him, mind. She was lucky to get a response hours later; usually it was days. Sometimes not at all.

It didn't matter after they confiscated the phone, some nonsense about 'unknown limits of her abilities'.

Then they said she might be a Brute. She was dangerous.

Those massive restraints. Bomb collar. Plugging her mouth painfully with acrid rubber and metal.

Hosing her down like an animal.

A big fucking charade, all of it.

She'd seen the news, on the tablet. The man who sprung her, he killed people. So the PRT said, anyway. It should have disturbed her, worried her... but she… just didn't care. She was just...

Done.

Just done.

She just wanted to sleep. On the actual bed. After an actual shower.

Maybe someday, she would want to wake up. Figure it all out. But… not today.

She turned the water off. She walked to the bedroom, not bothering to dry off, or put anything back on.

She crawled under the sheets of the heated mattress.

She closed her eyes, and waited for oblivion.

— — —

/AN: Have you ever, like… had a big, fat pile of nasty liquids spilled on you at work, #firstworld'ers? Imagine that feeling you have, in the moments after. Now imagine something a dozen times worse, like being locked in a locker full of filth. Now imagine something beyond imagination times worse, like having every limb shackled, a gag shoved in your mouth, told you're a menace, put on stage with the gag still in your mouth and lectured about how dutifully sorrowful they are to send you to a place the bogeymen are supposed to fear _for the rest of your life_. She fainted, then, you know. In canon.


	12. CH11 - Consequence II

CH11 - Consequence II

— — —

/AN: Warning: Explicit content.

— — —

" _I had long ago stopped believing in promises. Biological imperatives, yes. Environmental factors, yes. Promises, no." - Jeff VanderMeer, Annihilation_

— — —

When the door slowly slid open, I noticed.

At night, the hab lighting dimmed, but it was never completely dark.

I felt the mattress shift.

Then cool fingers grasped my flaccid cock, and wet warmth enveloped the head.

Obviously, the moment the door opened, I checked the sousveillance data.

I slid my elbows back, looking down at her. Canary— Paige— looked me straight in the eyes, and slid more of my hardening cock into her mouth. She climbed over my leg, settling down as she ran her tongue up and around the shaft, pumping the bottom softly with her hand.

She was wearing the same thing as yesterday. Lime green top and violet pants. Between temperature control and biomods, I wasn't wearing anything at all.

She let me slip out of her mouth with a faint _pop_. She crawled up. "God, you're cut," she muttered.

"What are…"

"Shut up," she interrupted. She pressed herself against me. Even if I hadn't known, I could tell that her brief time in prison hadn't been enough to hurt her fitness. There was muscle under that lithe surface. More than I would have expected.

I squeezed her arm experimentally, running my fingers over it. She gave a husky laugh, grinding her crotch into me. Looking at me. There was something intense in her gaze.

She wasn't in a good place. If I was a better person, I'd push her away.

I slid my hand up her shoulder, along her neck, and gripped her hair lightly. She didn't react even as I pulled her head toward mine. I kissed her. Her mouth opened for me, eagerly reciprocating. After a minute, I pulled back, letting her gasp for air.

She rested her head on my shoulder, breathing heavily, before I saw her hands slide down, gripping the waist of her pants and pulling down. I grasped them with a foot and pulled them the rest of the way.

I took hold of her hips and moved her, letting the shaft of my cock slide up and down against her core. I couldn't see it from this angle, but I could feel the tickle of downy fuzz and the hot, slick wetness that told me more than words ever could.

"Come on," she breathed into my neck. She grabbed my sides and ground herself into me, lifting her head and looking me in the eyes. "Do it, do it, do—"

I reached down, pushed my head in, and without pause thrusted up into her. She jerked, inhaling sharply, and I felt her pussy clamp down, like a vice. My eyes widened, and after letting out a breath, she caught my eyes again. Laughed once more. "The feathers... are just the surface," she whispered, sliding her body up my chest only to shove herself back down. She shuddered, and my cock throbbed. The pressure was intense, almost painful.

"I don't even know your name," she groaned. I felt her clench.

"Henry," I replied, pulling myself to a sitting position. She shifted, continuing to press herself into my chest, slowly rotating her hips. I growled, and grabbed her ass, forcefully pistoning her up and down my shaft.

"Henry," she whispered. "You won't hurt me, right?" There was something needful there, something deeper just out of sight.

"I don't hurt what's mine."

She shuddered again.

"That's what you want. Isn't it."

"Just… I… nf." Red was crawling up her chest and neck, and she kissed me hard. "Keep me safe?"

"Yes."

She spasmed on my cock, velvet steel tightening down. I continued to lift her up and force her back down, with difficulty, as she shook, whining incoherently. After six seconds, her shaking began to subside, and she looked at me in dull surprise. "Oh, god… you're still inside..."

I raised an eyebrow at her.

"Guys always get pushed out after I come," she said, her tone almost disbelieving. I rolled us over, putting her on her back, and started to speed up. She was impossibly tight now… but that wasn't a problem for me.

"We aren't going to be done for a long time," I promised, and there was nothing said after that. Just her guttering moans, and the sound of pounding flesh.

— — —

The atmosphere was different.

Paige was curled up against me, now, not at the far end of the couch. There was still something desperate, there, but for all that she seemed more settled. She wasn't walking on eggshells, like yesterday.

Not that she could walk very well right now, but that was something different altogether.

Lisa was still out of it. She had woken earlier, squinted at us briefly, said "nope," and turned resolutely away.

Sabah was my biggest concern. I didn't want to hide Paige, especially now, but I did not expect Sabah to handle the implications as Paige or Lisa did. Frankly, I still wasn't sure how Lisa felt about it— she and I had bigger issues right now to worry about.

As for Coil, I'd taken measures, but I was still thinking. I couldn't see his moves unless he succeeded, which obviously wasn't an option…

I did not fear him, but I knew the people around me were considerably more vulnerable than I was. Perhaps… I would need to show a few more cards. Maybe. It was hard for me to trust.

Abruptly, I stood up.

"Henry?"

"There's something I need to do," I said.

[Opening cellular communication with contact: Sabah… Ringing… Connected.]

"Hello?"

"It's Henry. I'm back… do you think we could meet? At that coffee shop on Saxon Court."

Silence.

"Coffee…" Her tone was strange.

"Is something wrong?"

"...No, um. Sure. What is this about?"

"I'll explain when we're there."

"...Yes. Okay."

— — —

We were sitting at a table, no costumes. My hat and boots neatly covering anything unusual about my body.

Sabah had yet to touch the coffee. She seemed nervous, almost distressed.

"Did you hear about Canary's case?" I asked.

"...Yes. Very unfortunate. Wasn't she broken out, though?" she said, confused.

"Yes. But I was just curious, if you thought her sentence was just."

Oddly, as I continued the subject Sabah seemed less nervous. I wondered what she had been worried about, but it didn't matter.

She would be more upset soon enough.

"Well…" She chewed her lip thoughtfully. "I must admit, I did not look very closely. Perhaps that is to my discredit. But the impression I got was… well, let me check things, so that I may answer you fairly." She pulled out her phone, a new model, I noticed. I waited quietly while she browsed.

"Okay," she said. "She mastered her boyfriend, and he tried to… force his penis into… one of his own orifices. He ended up…" she cringed. "...breaking his penis. Along with other lesser injury. But because you brought it up. I guess there is more to it, and looking further I find a claim that Canary only told him to 'go fuck himself' after a performance… but nothing more about that. Which is strange."

"Alright. Suppose that it was true. She told him to go fuck himself, and did not expect him to actually do it. Is the Birdcage fair?"

"...No. But I am biased, I think."

I stared at her seriously, and she shifted nervously. I got up, and stepped around the table, sitting next to her. She looked at me, eyes wide.

A flash of terahertz radiation told me there was nothing close that might hear.

"I was the one that broke her out."

For a long moment, Sabah did not move at all. Then she jerked up out of her seat, stepping away.

"You… what? People were killed, Henry. Is this some kind of, of joke?" Even as she said it, I could see that she didn't believe it.

"I understand if this is a prob—"

"You understand!?" she said loudly, louder than I'd ever heard her. "I've— I've made major decisions, based on the money from our work. I can't— I need it now, and you decided to go— to... " she gave a strangled laugh. "I thought this was going to be you hitting on me, but this is so, so much worse. I…"

She trailed off, staring at me. Turned and walked, stopped. Then kept walking, out of the coffee shop.

I didn't follow.

— — —

/AN: Mo money mo problems

/AN: As corrupt as they may be, they needed an excuse to call her a Brute, and for fun I decided they had one: her minor mutations aren't just skin deep. More better photoreceptors. Lower res screens look really messed up for the girl. She's got extra white muscle fiber from nonsensically applied bird physiology. It's not enough to decide a fight, but it does technically make her a Brute 1. If you squint really hard, and wave your hands furiously. It also means she contracts like steel cable (not _literally_ tho)… I imagine Alexandria wouldn't be even slightly sympathetic.


	13. CH12 - The Eye

CH12 - The Eye

— — —

" _Just be warned", you said. "Some day you will ask me to give up something I really love, and then it's going to get ugly." - David Levithan, The Lover's Dictionary_

— — —

Life was risk. All you could do was calculate it, mitigate it.

It was unfortunate that Sabah walked away. There was a possibility that she would repeat what she had been told, but the potential damage was limited. It was also very, very unlikely.

After all, what could be more stressful than telling the PRT your collaborator— if only in art— attacked their convoy? We'd done business, and that business would be at risk, profits she'd likely already spent, her reputation might be stained. She had already agreed that what had been done to Paige seemed unjust. It naturally followed that she might be treated unjustly. Forced into the Protectorate, perhaps? There was a persistent rumor of that sort of thing. I doubted it could happen, but if she saw things as I did this wouldn't be an issue in the first place.

It was necessary. All truth would out sooner or later, especially if I had elected to extend to her the biomods and cyberware that would prevent someone from being permanently killed. If she couldn't handle who I was, what I might do, it was better to know now. Before I revealed anything truly sensitive.

Plus, frankly? I didn't like lying. It made life far too complicated.

Lisa… she was a simple girl. Obviously, she didn't like the killing, but did she care enough to make some kind of moral stand? I doubted it.

I couldn't deny I was upset by Sabah's reaction, even though I expected it. I did like the girl. Truth be told, I had my own doubts about what I'd done. Not because I cared about the PRT troopers, but because it was obviously a problem.

In retrospect, maybe I should have claimed to receive Canary from a third party? No. It wouldn't have worked. Lies would stack and eventually she would know, and the loss would be greater— for I did not regret attacking the convoy, but I would regret lying to a friend. Nonsense hair-splitting morality, perhaps, to allow silence but forbid lies?

Regardless, it was too late.

I wasn't used to having to justify my actions, to be honest.

In that world of tomorrow, people came to me, not the other way around. They didn't feel obliged to share their opinions on my life choices, and I would have had no reason to care.

What a mess.

I massaged my forehead with one hand.

[Skitter is approaching the entrance.]

Great. More problems.

"Paige, could you step out for a minute?"

— — —

"What do you mean, you're out!"

"Stop shouting," Lisa said. "I mean I quit. I've got a better deal, okay?"

"You don't look like it," Skitter said dubiously. "Coil reached out to Grue. He said you'd been kidnapped by Epsilon. I thought it sounded weird, so I told the others to hold off."

"Got your bugs playing messenger, huh," Lisa said. "Look, I found out some stuff about Coil, and I don't want to work for him anymore. If I say any more, you'll be on his shitlist too."

"That doesn—"

[Security alert: The alleged identities of the entire Empire 88 parahuman membership, along with supporting evidence, have been published online. Numerous accounts promptly suggested that the only individuals capable of collecting the information in Brockton are Tattletale and Epsilon. Lastly, this location has been posted, along with photographic evidence of you and Tattletale entering the premises at various times. Posts occurred approximately eighteen minutes ago.]

With a thought, I had the notification replicated across speakers, silencing Skitter and Lisa's argument.

"...Well we're fucked," Lisa said. "It's hamfisted as fuck, but it doesn't matter. The Empire is fucked and they have to do something to somebody."

"Coil did this," Skitter said suddenly.

"Yep."

I sighed.

"Get out of here, Skitter."

She turned to Lisa. Lisa waved at her. "Go, seriously. You don't want to be associated with whatever stupid shit this guy is gonna do, trust me."

Skitter turned to me, her face hidden behind her mask. After a long moment, she sighed. "You better know what you're doing, Lisa."

She made her way out.

"So, uh, boss," Lisa said. "What now?"

"Oh, that's simple," I said. "Leave."

"But—"

I ignored her, and stepped through to the manufacturing floor, leaving the doors open.

Given the attention it had already earned, I had gutted the APC. The body and wheels were recycled, and I installed the technology into a classical, more jeep-like armored shell. The body still looked 'science fiction', but it at least appeared closer to local vehicles. Where the APC had no windows, this had a deeply tinted, two inch thick synthetic sapphire windshield.

The six use-once nanotube geckogrip wheels were a design that I had chosen in part because I would never use them again— a design concept that, in my time, never took off. Instead, I replaced them with four magnetically levitated, spherical tires. The smartmatter surface of the balls changed dynamically in response to the desired path and the terrain data, from barbed spikes on one extreme all the way to continuous gas spray for nominal hovering on the other. In the event of damage, the tire would calculate a new, undamaged circular path around the sphere and immediately rotate it into alignment with the road.

The tires were recessed, with ejectable, three inch thick conventional wheels to reduce attention. A measure to make the vehicle less blatantly "tinkertech" unless maximum performance was required.

The industrial fabrication systems of my base had been gutted as well. Taking Lisa's warning to heart, my fork moved the most important machines and materials away throughout the night. He had taken the Steel-lite drones as well. The only thing here was the base defenses and the APC.

I couldn't help the errant thought: what if Coil had observed some part of that, and it had contributed to this?

Pointless to wonder about now.

A thought had the APC hatch open. I returned to the common room. "Can you walk?"

"Yeah—"

"Get in the APC."

"So comfort, much concern, very okay I'm going I'm going," she said as I reached out, getting off the couch. "No touching, stick to your bird."

Speaking of which.

"Paige, Skitter is gone now," I said, my voice retransmitted through the speakers in the room she was waiting in. She quickly joined me in the main room. "We're moving, come on."

"We aren't packing?"

"No. Leave everything."

[UFO in— Multiple UFOs inbound. Identification in progress.]

Letting it repeat over speakers, I started moving, Paige only hesitating a moment before following. Running into the manufacturing floor, Lisa was only just starting to climb into the APC. I unceremoniously boosted her up, earning a squawk, before jumping and pulling Paige up after me.

[Identified. Glory Girl, ETA three minutes. Rune, ETA four. Crusader, ETA nine. Two additional UFOs inbound.]

The hatch shut, and the APC soundlessly accelerated sideways toward the truck dock, turning to face it just in time. The dock door slid up as the APC flew out, hitting the ground with a brief jolt.

[Disassembler nanoswarms activating now. Chemical self destruct will follow in thirty seconds.]

As the APC continued accelerating down the road, there was a dull rumble. Behind us, the roof of the meat packing plant collapsed. Shortly after, eye-searing yellow light and smoke erupted from the wreckage.

— — —

The question of _where_ to set up had been a big one. Irrational or not, I was loathe to abandon the city I had become so familiar with. Especially by being 'chased out'.

More practically, I didn't want my infrastructure in pieces any longer than it had to be. With only one fork moving multiple shipments out of the city… it would have taken too long. If I had tried that, I could have suffered a much larger setback today.

Access to the ocean, power, internet, able to be reached without suspicion yet not so busy that I couldn't get away with something peculiar…

Just outside of the Boat Graveyard. A condemned warehouse. It met all of those requirements, along with the easy access to raw metals in a pinch.

It didn't solve one fundamental problem.

The base could have held off a legion of ground forces, but that wasn't enough. I had to abandon it because it lacked anti-air. It could not stand to someone like Purity.

I regretted dismantling the railgun.

I would need to build this new facility properly, now that I could do so. Though my materials budget was tighter than ever, the high-end fabbers I had now would slash the time-costs that held me back from more advanced technology before.

The question, then, was what weapons?

"Are we just going to sit in here…"

I looked to Lisa. "Yes. My new base isn't built yet."

"I don't want to sit in a car for like two days," she complained.

"We haven't had a chance to talk," Paige offered. "I'm—"

"Paige Mcabee, mind-fucker extraor— erm." She shrank at my look. "Sorry."

"It's fine," Paige said, her tone somewhat strained.

"Lisa has impulse control issues," I said, triggering a scowl from the girl in question. "She gets herself into a lot of trouble as a result."

"So… how did you two meet?" Paige asked.

"A local supervillain, Coil, made me an offer that was too good to refuse. She showed up as a part of it. Spying on me on his behalf."

"Only a little bit," Lisa said defensively. "I didn't tell him much. Just enough to shut him up."

"I see," Paige said. "And now…"

"She made some… poor decisions, and is stuck living on my couch," I summarized.

"Speaking of which," Lisa said. "I hope there's a proper bedroom for me in your new place, seeing as I've thrown my lot in with your crazy self."

"Oh, you can just join me and Paige." Her expression was priceless. "Yes, Lisa, I have a bedroom for you in the design. A separate bedroom, even."

"A pity," Paige said, eying her speculatively, and Lisa twitched, before scowling at her.

"Ha ha. Very funny."

Paige just gave her a brief grin. "You deserved it."

"My last facility was a bit of a hack job," I said. "This is going to be much better thought out."

"How so?"

"You'll see."

I glanced at the schematic floating in my mind's eye. The warehouse wasn't much bigger than the meat packing plant, but it was significantly taller. There were windows in the roof, but they were opaque plastic panes. They let in sunlight without allowing anyone to see inside.

The industrial machinery I had moved here were set up in the center of the warehouse, powered by a large momentum battery that was in turn charged by the city power grid. A workaround so large bursts of power consumption wouldn't be noticed.

I had already scanned in the physical parameters of the warehouse. I designated the boundaries for modification and requirements, and in an instant Sia populated the schematic. A garage space, murder hallway with concealed heavy door to fab area, antechamber, hallway, common room, more rooms, bedrooms, bathrooms, human-sized door to fab area…

Unlike the plant, the warehouse didn't have a link-up type of truck dock, just massive garage doors that opened to a concrete slab high enough off the ground for trailers to open flush to it. Thankfully, an overhang kept rain off workers and, in my case, aerial observation off my business.

I took a few seconds to annotate the plan with more weapon systems, some furniture and stocks of clothing, then confirmed.

[Schematic confirmed. Required components calculated. Available drones and pre-existing fabrications counted, available feedstock indexed… task tree generated. Queuing blueprints. ETA for completion: 29 hours.]

Now we just needed to wait.

I glanced at Lisa.

If it were just me and Paige, I knew a good way to kill the time. Unfortunately, I doubted Lisa would appreciate it.

I'd just have to think of something else for us to do, while Coil was doing his level best to throw everyone in the city in my general direction.

— — —

[Routing cellular communication from contact: Sabah.]

The line was silent for a minute.

"...Henry?"

"Sabah?"

"Your lair was destroyed?"

"I am fine."

"I read that… don't think— I still… no. I shouldn't have called."

"Sab—"

[Call has disconnected.]

— — —

/AN: XANATOOOOOS

/AN: It's a suck plotpoint/move, I know, but it makes sense for Coil. Sure-kill attempts haven't worked, and Henry is moving, and following the trucks fails, and he's out of time so fuck it he was going to release those files anyway… not that anyone is going to take it as hard evidence of Epsilon doing anything. But he did stomp in and wave a gun around at Somer's, and didn't (visibly) join the alliance, and that Tattletale sure is a bitch, and fuck it we do have to be seen _doing something_ to try and keep the E88 from instantly imploding…

Thought about a running battle but it didn't work. Even if he didn't know, Purity wouldn't move unless her baby was stolen… erm.

without the blond exposition machine being w/ the Undersiders

that event

might not end well?

oops


	14. CH13 - The Storm

CH13 - The Storm

— — —

" _When his life was ruined, his family killed, his farm destroyed, Job knelt down on the ground and yelled up to the heavens, "Why god? Why me?" and the thundering voice of God answered: "There's just something about you that pisses me off." - Stephen King, Storm of the Century_

— — —

I'd thought about fabbing the necessary clothing to disguise us, and having us simply go somewhere for the evening, but after thinking about it, it wasn't an option.

"Sorry, Henry," Lisa said, her tone unapologetic. "The bland sterile mystique of your shit is a big part of the reason I'm not as messed up as when I showed up a few days ago. Going out for the day sounds fun and all, but if it means getting punched in the face by my own power, I have to pass."

"Sounds like you're stuck in the APC after all, then, since the warehouse isn't sterile at all right now," I replied. Her face fell.

Paige wouldn't have been a problem. The problem was me.

Coil had made it _quite_ clear how little unwritten rules mattered to him, and he had seen my face. I wasn't willing to gamble as to the limits of his surveillance.

Especially as Paige's life was so very insecure. Which… I could fix now.

"Paige."

She looked up from the tablet she had brought along. "Yeah?"

"Come with me, there's something we need to do." Lisa made a disgusted face. I triggered the hatch of the APC, and led Paige over to the rough circle of machines I had trucked in the night before. The hatch shut quickly behind us. In the center of the circle sat the healing vat.

I woke up my fork— which I still needed to merge— and the lid opened. He climbed out, stumbling slightly, then sat down by a fabber. "This… sucks," he said slowly, looking at me. "We need more real biomorphs."

"Is this… the guy who broke me out?" She paused. "I mean, the guy you had do it?"

"Both," I said, amused. "You have already gathered that I am a 'tinker'?"

She nodded, looking between us curiously.

"That is me as well," I said. "Another instance of myself. At the first opportunity, we will be merged back together. Right now, he has been doing things robots cannot be seen doing."

Her eyes widened, and she looked at him again. She walked over slowly, reaching out.

"Then he remembers…"

"No," I said. "Right now he remembers breaking you out, whereas I remember everything that came after. After we merge, I and future forks will possess both."

"But I do know what we've been doing," the chinese me said, grinning at Paige. She blushed.

"That isn't important right now," I said. "What is important is the method. My technology defeats death, and I want to install into you the same protections. So that it is impossible for you to be permanently killed short of eradicating everything I have built on this Earth." I gave her a brief smile. "I did promise to keep you safe."

Her mouth worked as she stood there. "I… wow. Alright. What do you need me to do?"

"Just get in the vat he just stepped out of," I said simply. "I will handle the rest."

— — —

Paige's body confounded me.

Her genetic code did reflect some of her alterations. She had four times the photoreceptors as a unmodified flat, with similar enhancement of the optic nerves. However, simulation of the DNA generated eyes and optic nerves only 10% better than the norm. It was as though her mutations were only reflected in her DNA to the extent required for the cells to function properly.

Even this was not consistent. She had gene markers for increased fast-twitch muscle mass, but it wasn't enough. I had difficulty reconciling the data that terahertz and nanites reported, until intuition bridged the gap.

There was a subtle distortion of space. She quite literally had a little more mass to her musculature than should fit in the space they took up.

This made her larynx easier to figure out. At first glance, she possessed twice the vocal folds as a normal human. But she simultaneously possessed something resembling a syrinx— the bird equivalent of vocal cords, and altogether different in structure— in the same space. A space that was only accessible from certain angles. Somehow. In this case, the genetics were a clusterfuck. The simulated throat based on her DNA didn't form anything functional for making noise at all.

I had a suspicion her actual throat, distorted space and all, still shouldn't be able to make some of the sounds I'd heard her make.

The DNA for the throat was corrupt, but the genetics for the eyes were enhanced, if not to the degree of her actual eyes. Her hair _was_ bright yellow genetically, but the DNA to express the feathers was only present in portions of her scalp, and not in the rest of her cells. Whereas the other genetic changes were in all cells. Some things were achieved purely through normal structures, and others bent space itself.

It was all haphazard, no consistency, to the point that it all irritated me simply by existing.

I tore myself away, and focused on the practical. I disabled the vat routines to optimize the musculature for now, and region-blacklisted her larynx, eyes, and scalp except for the case of life-threatening injury. Other than that I allowed the medichines to repair everything to peak performance. I queued fabbing and installation of the basic biomods, mesh inserts, and cortical stack.

[Task prioritized. Estimated time to completion: 7 hours.]

With that done, I turned my thoughts to Coil. Online forums were in a furor. Since random accounts had claimed that I and Lisa were responsible for the leak, I responded in kind. Sia generated a series of new accounts and suggested that it was Coil's doing, he was exactly the type, creepy mastermind…

While my PHO account denied responsibility to anyone messaging me, I didn't make a public response. As no one of importance— by which I meant a faction or their parahumans— had publicly accused me, I felt that acknowledging the rumor would only give it undue credibility. My private denials were reposted in the threads in any case.

I sighed, and with a nod to my other self I walked back to the APC. The hatch opened silently, but Lisa looked up as I climbed back inside.

"Where's your toy?"

"What's your problem with Paige," I said bluntly. Lisa looked taken aback.

"Erm— well…" she said, pausing. "Okay. Maybe I've been a _little_ tetchy."

I gave her an unimpressed stare.

"I'll try to be nicer?"

I sighed. "I notice you aren't sorry."

She leaned her head back against the wall. "Okay, so. I kind of liked it when it was just you and me, you know, sitting around silently and shit. It was a break. And then you brought in Parian, and now Canary… you starting a collection?" She gave me a weak grin.

It sounded like she was dancing around being jealous to me— for my attention? My space? She was a teenage girl. I wasn't going to waste time trying to make sense of her.

"Just… do better," I said finally.

"Sure thing."

A buzzing noise abruptly interrupted. "Huh? Oh," Lisa muttered, looking at a battered flip phone. "Not used to having reception around you."

I shrugged. "If you'd ever asked, I would have had the old base boost your signal." I paused. "Who knows that number?"

"Just Skitter. It was my newest 'civilian' phone. I was going to do more girl stuff with her, but… yeah."

She flipped it open, putting it to her ear. "Bumblebee S. No immediate danger, but the situation doesn't look good?

Wait, you're doing _what?_ No, look, I'd like to help but my power is fucked right now. I— damnit Taylor no. Fuck, give me a second."

She fumbled for Paige's tablet, pulling it over. She tapped at it distractedly.

A video started playing. "...Until she is returned, this doesn't stop. I will take this city apart until I find you or you come to stop me. My subordinates will murder anyone, _everyone_ , until the matter is settled. I don't care…"

"Fuck," Lisa said. "Okay, Taylor, let me think." She replayed the video, wincing. She leaned back against the wall, closing her eyes. "All I can tell you is she's a mother, and her baby was taken. Probably because of Coil's shit, but I don't really know because my power is toast right now, just that much has my head splitting open. She's doing this indiscriminate shit because she's lost her shit over it, just stay away from her. No, Taylor— god damn she hung up." Lisa tossed the phone down in disgust.

After a moment, she gave me a sideways look. "Do you think…"

"No."

"But—"

" _No._ "

She scowled. "You're seriously going to hang my friends out to dry? How is this any different from Bakuda?"

"I wasn't trying to rescue _them_ from Bakuda, I was trying to rescue _you._ "

She ducked her head. "I— damnit." She was silent for a minute, before looking up, her cheeks tinged faintly red. "I can't just— fuck. Fuck. Please? Please help?"

I sighed. "What can I even do?"

"Skitter's got it into her head that she has to do something about Purity. If you can take her out somehow, then…"

 _Sia, can you locate Purity?_

[Checking news media. Calculating footage origin points, triangulating. Historical data computed. Purity moves too quickly. Public footage is too outdated. She is highly visible in flight. Launching delivery drone…]

I waited patiently, as a drone spun up and my fork let it out of the warehouse.

[Target identified. Order queued and prioritized. ETA: approximately forty three minutes.]

"Give me forty five minutes," I said.

— — —

I watched through the eye of the approaching product delivery drone. The feed flickered white as another building was gutted, the walls collapsing into a rising wave of dust and ash. A part of me wanted to study the effect.

But that wasn't going to be an option.

[Launching.]

With a harsh whine that could be heard even inside the APC, the the jet turbines on the side of the missile spun up, the thick frame welding it to the floor of the warehouse bending under the stress, the vibration rattling the building. Explosive bolts detonated, and the missile blew through the thin metal siding of the warehouse in an instant, roaring across the bay. It accelerated, shooting past Mach 1, then the jet turbines were blown off as the scramjet ignited. It took a long, sweeping loop into the stratosphere, then back over Brockton Bay...

[Target locked.]

...and though it had a camera, there was nothing to see. The scramjet dived into the city faster than sound, going from the stratosphere to smashing into Purity's skull in seconds. For all intents and purposes, it was instantaneous.

[Confirming… confirmed. Target eliminated. Note: anomalous impact readings.]

Slow motion replay from the delivery drone showed the scramjet colliding. Rather than plowing through her body, it shoved her downward, crumpling and disintegrating into plasma. Her skull shattered, and then the glow vanished, her body promptly exploding into boiling vapor as it should have from the start.

"It's done. Purity is gone," I said, opening my eyes.

Lisa blinked at me.

"...What."

After a second, she pulled herself together, picking up her phone and dialing. "Hummingbird F. What? Purity's gone. What do you mean how did I know, that's what I do, I know shit..."

I leaned back. Doing that was… unwise. But Lisa wasn't the type to beg. I couldn't say no.

I'd just have to live with the consequences.

— — —

/AN: did somebody say missiles


	15. CH14 - Intermission I

CH14 - Intermission I

— — —

/AN: Warning: Explicit content.

— — —

" _I believe most people are essentially good. I know that I am. It's you I'm not entirely sure of." - Full Dark, No Stars, 2010_

— — —

When I had constructed my first base, I had fabricated more hab components than I used. While some rooms required custom parts, a lot of it was the same every time. It was a normal part of habitat processes to maintain a stockpile of replacement parts— even when the parts in question were as simple as carpet squares or room dividers.

As a result, when Paige first opened her eyes, it was not to a dilapidated warehouse. She was lying naked on a couch, in a room identical to the common room I had before. I was kneeling next to her, and she looked at me for a moment, before her eyes flicked to the side. Then back, then to the side…

"This is… confusing," she finally said.

"Don't try to focus on the entoptics— the stuff floating in your vision," I clarified. "Despite your instinct to look 'at' them, they are already in full focus. Your mind will adjust in time."

"This is what you see all the time?"

"No," I replied. "It's a tiny fraction of it."

"...Huh."

"I didn't install any software beyond the basics. I didn't know how you would feel about an AI listening to your thoughts, for example. Unfortunately most of the software I use depends on one."

"This is so out there. Does Lisa have this stuff too?"

"No," I said. "She may be upset once she realizes just what you have received."

"Okay… I have to ask. She was around before I got here, but I'm the one getting the scifi brain tech?"

"I don't want to give you the wrong idea," I said slowly. "Lisa has a way of growing on you— on me, at least. But what I like about her is precisely what makes her dangerous. She can be foolish. Impulsive. She turned on her boss as soon as a she saw a better deal, or worse, without proper thought at all. I don't think she will do that to me… but I've only known her a short time. I don't _know_. "

"You've only known me a few days," Paige said.

"I've researched you. You do not strike me as foolish, or impulsive, or fickle… and I think you have nowhere else to go. An ugly basis for trust, but a basis nonetheless."

After a moment, I reached over and cupped the side of her face. "We also have… a certain understanding, I think." I ran my hand down the curve of her jaw, and her cheeks reddened.

"...Yeah."

She just laid there, gazing at me, as I slid my fingers down her neck. She reached out and tugged lightly on my arm, and I got up, my bodysuit coming apart. I slid behind her on the couch, and she pressed herself against me, opening her legs just long enough to allow my cock to slide between her thighs.

We laid there quietly for a while.

"Have you thought about reaching an _understanding_ with Lisa?" she asked suddenly.

"I have," I admitted. "But she has made very blatant comments discouraging such things. I don't think she would respond well to an aggressive approach… and fear is unattractive."

"...Huh. Not a one woman kind of guy?"

I abruptly recalled that the sexual mores of this time were very different from my own.

"Is that a problem?"

"...Well," she said, her tone awkward. "Um."

"I hope you aren't upset by—"

"No. Well, sort of? I've been in an open relationship before. Not that I'm assuming, I mean, okay if I'm supposed to be with only you I'd feel kind of bothered, I guess," she said, stumbling.

"I don't expect you to limit yourself," I said quickly.

"Heh. There aren't any other men around, anyway. Just Lisa… which. I'm into girls too." She paused. "Hypothetically, not really because I agree with you about her, but hypothetically, if I wanted to sleep with Lisa you wouldn't get mad or something?"

"No."

"And… if it was a guy?"

"...No," I said slowly, the word tasting bitter. "But… I might get a bit aggressive." I wrapped an arm around her and gave a sharp squeeze. "In the end, I'm still an animal."

"Okay. Okay," she breathed out. She wiggled a little, her thighs flexing around my shaft, and I slid my hand down her stomach. Her slit was slick, wet. I slowly ran my fingers along it, dipping briefly inside. She squirmed, and I laughed.

"I… I wouldn't want anyone else anyway," she said. She twisted, forcing me to pull my hand away long enough for her to roll over, and locked eyes with me. She reached down and gripped my cock, giving it a tug.

"So, um, everything feels a little more… intense," she said, her voice hitching as I resumed fondling her sex.

"I thought you would appreciate it," I said, my voice edged with a dark amusement. I pinched her clit, and she jerked.

"Is my body just a toy for you?" she said, pumping my cock.

"Yes," I said, and I heard her breathing deepen slightly. I took my cock, still in her hand, and rubbed the head along her cunt. She let go, bringing her hand up to suck on her fingers, her eyes still locked with mine. I pushed the head into place, and in a single motion, I reached behind her and pulled.

She gave a short gasp, her fingers coming free, and froze, a stillness betrayed by the wet heat clenching and twitching around my shaft. After a few seconds, she breathed out raggedly, and began moving her hips in a slow, circular motion. She gave me a saucy grin.

"Definitely… beats the birdcage," she breathed out.

I rolled her up on top of me, still impaled on my cock. Getting a firm grip on her ass, I swung my legs off the couch and stood. A playful upwards jerk got had her yelping into my shoulder, and I walked into the nearest bedroom. Laying her down on the mattress, I yanked her legs up, pulled most of the way out of her and then stopped. I held it there, waiting.

She gave me a tortured look. "Fucking do it, come— oh!" I thrust deep, burying myself inside her, my balls audibly slapping against her ass. I pulled back out and slammed it home again. If there was anything I had learned about Paige, it was that she liked it hard. Fast, rhythmic pounding, reducing the girl to a incoherent, hot mess rippling and spasming around my dick.

" —I want you, it, fucking do it, come in me baby, come on please fuck—"

Balls deep, I relented, a switch flipped in my mind and my rock-hard cock pulsed, firing in hot spurts, and Paige exploded, her cunt squeezing hard enough it hurt.

I dropped on top of her, then rolled us to the side, and just watched as she slowly pulled herself together.

After a minute, her breathing slowed, and she smiled at me. "So... tell me more about that AI thing."

— — —

I had infected Brockton Bay.

My most troubling limit had been power. Coil provided diesel for my initial expansion. By the time of his final betrayal, I had reached the farthest heights of nanofabrication. Amongst the benefits was metallic hydrogen. While there were times and places for more sophisticated composites, metallic hydrogen had a brutal simplicity. It was perfect for solving my power problem.

It only took a day and a half before protean nanoswarms connected my new home with the old network of thin, superconductive metallic hydrogen power lines that spiderwebbed beneath the city. Through this method, I could steal unlimited amounts of city power without creating a traceable anomaly.

The same cables tapped every available data line, providing an ever-increasing amount of bandwidth. Which, it turned out, made it ever more apparent that shoving a fork of my relatively dumb muse AI at problems had limits. The debacle with the outing of E88 proved this— generic algorithms for collecting daily news weren't cutting it anymore, not with the threats that were out there.

I dug into my solarchives and located a proper SIGINT AI. Dubbed _Artemis_ , it held a constant finger to the pulse of the internet, from global media to a near-realtime observation of every Brockton-related forum or mailing list in existence. I would not be caught off guard like that again.

Similarly, the new base had a proper hab AI. The effect was less obvious, but noticeable nonetheless. Congested fabber instructions were untangled more smoothly, priorities were inferred better, hab construction was parallelized more efficiently at the automech level…

For the first time, I also had access to fissiles. In as little as twenty years— in my timeline, at least— the basic methodology behind practical seawater mining for uranium entered practical use. Adsorbent synthetic fibers accumulated the desired elements, then chemical doping and irradiation released them. From there, it was often as simple as rinsing into a centrifuge.

Needless, to say, by the time transhumanity was conquering moons like Oberon the technology was orders of magnitude more sophisticated. Where crude techniques in 2018 might get two grams a month for every pound of fibre, it was more than five, and tow-drones or artificial currents could increase the yield even more.

All that mattered was, courtesy of a dozen metric tons of synthetic fibres and automated aquatic drones, I had a small but more than plentiful supply of elements that were difficult to buy. Or, in the case of transuranics, just could not be bought. Somehow. Earth Bet was suspiciously competent in certain things, it seemed.

This meant radioactive isotope generators and microreactors, which together with practical manufacture of momentum batteries allowed drones unlimited by the distance to the nearest power line. Artemis had requested and then deployed stealthed drones which were exploring the country even now, searching for targets of opportunity and threats alike.

Right now, my biggest concern was Coil. With the E88 reveal he had broken the silence, and I wasn't sure how to respond.

"You don't know where he is," I repeated.

"Nope," Lisa said, popping the P as she gave me a irreverent smile. She was far too cheerful for someone being so very unhelpful.

"How is that even possible?"

"Coil is super paranoid. His big ace is the two timelines, but it is only good if you don't know where he— and even his men— sleep. Otherwise he'd be just as vulnerable as every other faction to attacks on his enemies terms. Skitter says she might can find out, but let's face it— she isn't me. Jury's out on that panning out."

I frowned. Without a location to hit, it was impossible to retaliate against Coil. Or rather, impossible to put a permanent end to the threat. Attacking his soldiers or airing his laundry was escalation that provided no real benefit.

Perhaps I could reach a truce? …No. As halfhearted as it was, his attack on my reputation was unprovoked. He did not communicate. Irrational agents could not be trusted.

I glanced at Lisa.

"What he did isn't worth paying attention to," Paige said suddenly. Lisa scowled at her, giving me an upset glance, then turned back to her tablet. She had quickly divined some of what I had done to Paige before the first day was out, and ever since had been a smoldering pile of resentment. She wouldn't say anything, and to be honest I didn't know what to say myself.

There wasn't really a tactful way to say I didn't trust her with full-contact connectivity to my burgeoning mesh. Transhuman network security was hardened by decades of sophisticated infowar, and then brutally tempered by godlike superintelligence, physics-breaking exsurgent strains, basilisk hacks, ETI threats, and more. But…

Her power. I did not understand it, but I understood how it helped her subvert security systems in Earth Bet. Combined with my uncertain understanding of the girl herself…

I shoved my confliction down.

"I will just have to ignore Coil for now. I'm not interested in a street war. According to Artemis, general sentiment is that the claims about me and Tattletale were nonsense. If anything, this will provide an extra layer of disbelief against similar accusations in the future."

I paused.

"With that said.. what do you mean, Paige?"

"Something that was beaten into me early on with my label was there's always somebody spinning bullshit about you on the internet," she said absently, her eyes flicking in response to something unseen. "If you respond, in a sense it, like, legitimizes it? It says it was worth you speaking up about. It can also put whatever bullshit front-and-center for all your followers. Usually making the drama bigger. Sometimes it's already that bad so that's okay, and maybe this was like that, but I'm still leaning toward saying nothing. Ignoring is the go-to response."

"That doesn't really explain why his attack isn't worth _any_ response."

"Because it wasn't serious. He spent god knows how long prepping to dox E88, then half-assed that. As an attack, it was a joke. Literally the equivalent of attacking one of the gangs by just posting their locations online." She glanced at me. "Honestly, he did worse by silently quitting on the materials. At least that isn't deniable. Though you are just as much at fault for not even calling him."

"He _is_ bad at calling people," Lisa snarked.

"He was operating in bad faith from the start," I said, a touch defensive. "Perhaps I should have spoken up, but I was happy to be rid of him."

"Then be happy," she said simply. "Lisa says he was trying to murder you, but, well, he can't. I don't think he is going to do anything more serious unless he finds a way that doesn't leave you around to retaliate."

"Yeah, sure, ignore the control freak bond villain," Lisa interjected. "What could possibly go wrong."

I sighed.

"Fuck it, why am I even bothering, you're just going to side with her because she's riding your dick," Lisa said with sudden harshness, standing up. Before I could formulate a response, she walked out.

"...Awkward," Paige said.

"...Yes."

It was quiet for a minute.

"Oh, yeah. Have you heard anything from that Parian girl? She isn't explaining anything to her followers about the stop on your collabs. Some of the rumors on PHO are really wild." There was something in her tone. Jealousy?

"No. She has not called me since we moved. I don't think she wants to speak to me."

"Wow. That… sucks." She sighed. "I miss performing."

"Hm."

I thought, measuring the risks. She could do so anonymously, but it would be difficult to avoid stochastic links to Brockton Bay. Combined with the means of her jailbreak, attention would end up on me. Simply admitting possession of Canary would increase my threat rating, but contrasted against my silence afterward, and the perspective held in the PRT files on me that Lisa had dug up while searching for the convoy in the first place…

This 'WEGDGD' added a new dimension to mutually assured destruction. If the enemy can divine the future, it made dead man's switches much easier to use as a threat. They wouldn't need to be convinced— they would simply know it was true.

As for the other factions, I could go whole hog, take credit for alpha-striking the terrorist Purity as well. It had a perfect _casus belli_ , and the strategic implications of that kill was powerful all on its own. Perhaps.

"You seem to have some experience with matters of reputation," I said slowly. "What do you think about this?"

— — —

[Artemis: We have a problem.]

 _You're going to have to be more specific._

[Artemis: There are other AIs.]

— — —

/AN: There's a calm before the storm… and there is rain on the horizon.


	16. CH15 - Intermission II

CH15 - Intermission II

— — —

" _A strange thing happens when you are very rich, even when one's wealth is as artificial as in our society. You develop a solipsism of sorts. The world yields itself to your will. Everything becomes your reflection, and after a while looking into your own eyes is dull." - Hannu Rajaniemi, The Quantum Thief_

— — —

When I entered the other room, Lisa was curled up in a chair. She glanced up at me, then returned to boring a hole in the tablet in her hands.

"You're upset," I said.

"Yeah. Yeah, I'm upset."

I hesitated. She looked up and scowled.

"You do a lot of stupid bullshit, and it only works because your tinkertech is even more bullshit. But that can't last forever, and it's like you don't even see anything wrong with what you're _doing_!" She stood up, and started pacing. "That's not even getting into this third wheel bullshit just because I didn't jump your dick—"

"That's not it," I interrupted.

"Oh? Then what, then?"

I could hear the hurt in her voice, and it left me at a loss to respond.

"I… am afraid," I said slowly. "Maybe I am too casual about threats, but it is as you say: I am protected by my technology. By my secrets. You… I've been unfair, maybe."

"Oh," she said dully, stopping. "That's… worse, really. You don't trust me."

Fuck.

"It isn't that I trust Paige more," I said. "You are just more _capable_. But... I've treated you poorly."

I made a decision: no more waffling. This was weakness, and it was becoming both distasteful and untenable. I should either throw her out, or bring her in…

...and I wasn't willing to just throw her out.

Damn it all.

"Come on," I said. She looked up, surprised. "You need the mods I gave Paige."

She got up, disbelief still painted on her face, and followed me. "Don't think this means everything is shiny, just like that," she mumbled.

I said nothing.

We stepped into the manufacturing floor, and I led her to an empty vat.

"This is a healing vat. It also serves the function of installing biomods and cyberware. By the time you are done, you will heal faster, live longer, sleep less, require less hygiene, resist disease better— if not be flatly immune— and possess immunity to zero gravity, depression, shock, and allergies." I paused. "Also internet in your brain."

She blinked. "Well shit." Without any further prompting, she stepped up to the vat and started to strip. "Don't get any fucking ideas," she shot over her shoulder, but I caught the edge of a smile. She was fucking with me.

I took it as a sign that our friendship wasn't as irreparable as it had started to appear.

— — —

"Where's Lisa?"

"In a healing vat."

"Ah," Paige said. She chewed her lip thoughtfully. "I thought about saying something, but you know her better— I didn't want to criticize. But with the way she was going I was afraid you'd end up causing the bullshit you were worried about. Which leads to what you brought up earlier."

"Hm?" I said.

"Okay. So if I understood correctly, you were thinking about, like, openly saying you busted me out, deliberately setting up horrible stuff to happen if you were crossed, _and_ publicly declaring you killed Purity? All to, what, intimidate everyone so much I could perform?"

"Yes. Though it was just a hypothe—"

" _No._ " She sighed. "I'm touched. Really. But. That's just… ugh. It might even _provoke_ an attack."

Paige gave me a serious look. "I thought about it, and asked Artemis to look at stuff, and aside from some concerns about nanotech, you're barely on the radar as a big threat. Doing that stuff would make you into a bad guy. Like, not just villain bad guy, but kill order bad guy, PRT losing sleep unless you're dead bad guy. And I don't think it would work. The PRT is obligated to try to break up a fucking concert, it's suicide not to. And then what?"

She paused.

"Also, Lisa would have an aneurysm. Possibly froth at the mouth."

I couldn't help but laugh. "Very well. If they _must_ attack a concert… what if they can't. Physically can't."

"I'm not following. What, like Triumvirate-tier super force fields?"

"No, no. Like… augmented reality. Your power-related physiology wouldn't work purely in simulspace, but that's easy to work around. Attendants get VR helmets, and experience a perfect simulation of a concert hall with a duplicate of the real you, visual and auditory. Conversely, the simulspace attendants are replicated into your senses by your cyberware. I'm sure there are even drivers somewhere to finagle physical contact, if you wanted to touch the crowd…"

Paige seemed lost in thought. "That… wow. I don't know if anyone wants to hear me now, though," she said.

The room was silent as we both sat in thought. Such technology, all for Canary's benefit… it would suggest powerful Tinker support. Which could be a problem.

Unless, of course, the technology _wasn't_ for Canary's benefit. Not specifically.

My mind flashed back.

 _There are other AIs._

Artemis could not tell me much more.

Compromised accounts and forums, dummy websites, indirect data sources, like common platforms that allowed third parties to see what page another user was currently looking at… he had picked up evidence of intelligent action taken at speeds no normal human was capable of. Perhaps there were one or two parahumans with both enhanced minds and an equally fast web interface. Unlikely, but possible. But the glimmers of activity detected were more... inhuman. So Artemis said, at least.

He was attempting to trace them. But the internet architecture, designed with parahumans in mind, was resistant. Even deploying methodologies Sia was never capable of and ludicrous computing power, progress was slow. Dangerous, too— Artemis could compromise a honeypot system, fumbling blindly inside an illusion while _they_ learned about _us_.

But sometimes… multiple problems could converge to a singular solution.

In my timeline, the internet of now emerged from unimaginably rapid technological growth and the Fall as something altogether different. The mesh.

A decentralized 'internet-of-things', hosted across _everything_. When a device the size of a credit card had processing power measured in exaFLOPs, the paradigm changed. Anything short of scientific-research-grade physics simulation or sentient minds could essentially run for free, just off the idle cycles in everything: clothes, weapons, appliances, the walls, knick knacks, even nanotech in the very _air_.

While such computational capacity wasn't simply laying around in people's discarded soda cans on Earth Bet, that wasn't a problem. There were designs for backbone mesh servers, even if they were not normally required. Just by giving people the ability to create, customize, and share even basic simulspaces, I would have created something no one could ignore. A perfect neutral platform for Canary…

...and with a few more features, also the perfect bait for possible local AI— whether at the direction of their masters, or because they were full-fledged AGI exploring it for themselves.

With all the mesh nodes under my control... Artemis could passively observe everything.

There was a trust issue, of course. But it wouldn't matter in the end. The carrot was too big. Those with little to lose, or little to be gained from, they would make the jump— whether a calculated risk or a impulse borne of false invincibility or naivete. They would build _worlds_. Curiosity and cajoling would bring in others, and those around _them_ , a cascade that, in the end, would bring all but the most suspicious and skeptical to try the technology. To see imagination made real, worlds without limit. To be… everything they couldn't be. Not in the real world.

Not yet.

Despite the sudden urge to design a mesh topology for Earth Bet, there was one thing I still needed to do first.

The construction of redundant resleeving facilities. Not much to them: five exowombs, a handful of synthetic case morphs, a healing vat, ego bridge, desktop fabber, and some automechs. The modest power requirements were met by small polywell fusion reactors.

Shipping-preparation algorithms converted the design to a densely packed cube of prefabricated parts, and Artemis would airlift them to remote locations across the east coast. From there, the cubes would handle constructing a buried or otherwise hidden room themselves.

The exowombs would take time to bear fruit, unfortunately. But the sooner they started, the sooner they would finish. Biosculpting could render a standard splicer morph nearly indistinguishable to someone's original flat, so that wasn't an issue.

Of course, I didn't use a flat. Paige had genetic changes that might actually matter. Lisa's DNA had nothing of value, but… somehow I doubted she would see it that way.

I went ahead and configured one exowomb in each facility to grow clones of the Hyperbright morph, Paige, and Lisa. Lisa didn't need a custom morph, but it wasn't like it cost me anything. If they became necessary… the first resleeve was traumatic enough. Better to avoid extra loss or alienation.

Of course, this touched on the real issue. The slow growth rate of biomorphs. I believed it was deliberate, perhaps something to do with an artificial scarcity, but the fact remained. Designing a stable, holistic improvement to growth speed would be a daunting task. Even for me.

I needed a easier way to speed things up. I needed to cheat.

Convenient, then, that this world was full of cheats.

A tinker had previously contacted me through PHO. A man named Blasto. He was looking for custom lab equipment; I gave him that, and something extra. A delivery of a dumbed-down healing vat, and huge tanks of laboratory-grade CHNOPS biological feedstock. He paid with tinkertech organisms, samples, and associated notes.

I imagine we both thought ourselves to be getting the better deal.

From what little he had been willing to explain, and from what Artemis could put together, he could grow human-sized or larger organisms in a matter of _days_. Whether his methodologies would work for human-level intelligence, or could be used to produce a more properly human body… that was less clear. But if it _was_ possible, it might represent a solution, if only to supplying generic biomorphs. I doubted it would be effective for proper morphs, like Hyperbrights. The obligatory plant hybridization would surely screw something up.

I considered other avenues. Dispatch, in Houston, time acceleration bubbles. Lizardtail, regeneration bestowal, in Boston. Panacea, a healer right here, in Brockton Bay.

Dispatch was unlikely to work out. But Lizardtail and Panacea… they merited further consideration.

They weren't tinkers, of course, but Artemis had pointed out a statistically unlikely pattern between Bakuda's more exotic bombs, and the abilities of parahumans in New York and Brockton Bay. Blasto had provided further insight: a tinker could learn from powers, though the most _he_ had accomplished to date was small boosts to regeneration and durability.

Well, there was a reason Bakuda stood out. It was time for me and Bakuda to have a proper conversation. And if it didn't work out… well, it wasn't like I was stopping the other experiment I had in motion.

— — —

"I should have paid way more attention to Brian and his workout shit."

Lisa bounced a tablet in her hand experimentally. After a minute, she stepped over to and dragged a case morph. "Bullshit." She came up to me, and unceremoniously grabbed my arm, pulling hard enough for me to brace myself.

"Lisa, you're acting silly."

"You know why!"

She'd adapted to the entoptics almost seamlessly, but unlike Paige seemed fascinated with her strength. I didn't see why— it wasn't even peak human, since by default the vat preserved her outside appearance. But… on second thought, I could see it. A given person's physical limit was a shackle they didn't even recognize, because they'd never been stronger. Someone weak getting fit for the first time might feel the same— it might even inspire a fierce dedication to self-improvement. Apparently Lisa hadn't been willing to suffer long enough to get to that point.

"Okay, so, Coil. Please tell me you aren't really going to ignore him."

"What would you have me do?" I said rhetorically. "I don't know where he is, and even if I did, he has not overtly attacked me. You say he wants to, but you don't _know_ for sure. I've taken steps to make it so you and Paige can't be killed. If I openly hunt him down, that violates the 'unwritten rules'. If I just attack his men, that escalates any hostility without solving the problem. I have Artemis quietly looking for him, but he isn't a fool. Until he slips up there just… isn't anything else to do."

"Look… I'm scared, okay? Maybe this mind copying shit is being unkillable to you, but I don't know if I can believe that. I don't know if Paige believes it either. Hell, what if we aren't killed. You expect us to pull the trigger on ourselves?" She sighed. "I just want to do something. I'm afraid I'm going to be stuck inside your base, or always looking over my shoulder, you know?"

"...What exactly did you see in Coil's files?"

She hesitated. "You can't tell Paige."

I frowned. "Why."

"Because she'll want to do something right now, and _you_ just said you can't."

"Lisa."

"Okay. There was a kid, alright? He kidnapped her during the bank robbery. I thought it was temporary, like a ransom or something. But she's still missing, and Coil's got a dirty nurse on staff and orders for some nasty drugs. Special drugs, too. Tinkertech migraine suppressants. He had some investigator notes on file about her, headaches and shit— I put it together.

She's a Thinker, and he's keeping her prisoner."

— — —

/AN: Wryyyyyyyy


	17. CH16 - Interlude: Bakuda Greg

CH16 - Interlude: Bakuda / Greg

— — —

" _No one can tell what goes on in between the person you were and the person you become. No one can chart that blue and lonely section of hell. There are no maps of the change. You just come out the other side._

 _Or you don't."_

 _\- Stephen King, The Stand_

— — —

She opened her eyes, jerking up with a gasp. Where was she?

Alice looked around wildly. It was a sterile room. The off-white panels were… were…

Something wasn't right.

On edge, she climbed to her feet. She was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt. 2% polyester.

What the fuck happened?

That asshole shoved some kind of hood over her head and now… god her head was pounding. She couldn't fucking think straight.

Stumbling, she looked for an exit. There wasn't a door anywhere she could see, but turning revealed a fold-out table, covered in everything from hand soap to uranium. Fucking URANIUM.

Something wasn't right.

Walking cautiously over, Alice peered at the small, grey block. Somehow, she knew it was uranium, but that wasn't right. She trusted the feeling.

Surveying the table, she grinned. Something wasn't right, but she knew how to figure this out.

— — —

The hyperspectrometer bomb was an ugly thing. It was something really borderline for her, and her power kept stuttering. She had to stumble, half blind, guided only by... PHYS 1116? It was hard to remember, for some reason. Still, nothing was impossible for her. The result spoke for itself.

With a glimmer of triumph, she punched the trigger, and with a quiet _whompf_ , rea—

[Error 1114 in dynamically loaded library : initialization of proton pairs failed. Detailed error log: error not found. Catching exception…]

—ality shuddered, and there was a smoking hole in the case. She ran over and read the attached display, and her eyes widened. It clicked. No fucking shit something wasn't right, physics was wrong, it was _fake_ , this was some kind of... bullshit VR?

 _Leet?!_

"You think you can fool me?" she shouted. "I'm not gonna play along with this shit, let me out, you—

[Termination condition(s) met. Terminating simulspace. Examining simulated outcome. Analyzing… done. Result: skill intact. Lowering pruned neuron skill-relevance priority. Skillsoft neural mapping of skill definition progress: 14% approximate. Estimated point of diminishing returns: 9 months simulspace. 114 hours real time.]

[Warning: Brute-force skillsoft generation from a low-boundary skill parameter file can result in trait and memory bleed-through.]

[New scenario generated from . Resetting infomorph to backup. Applying calculated neural pruning.]

[Warning: Skill map precision is still too low. Proto-skillsoft not applied to gen_ . Running proto-skillsoft as standalone ego.]

[Initiating new psychosurgery iterat— Pausing process. Simulspace restarted. Loading modified scenario. Continuous backup enabled. Connecting.]

— — —

She opened her eyes, jerking up with a gasp. Where was she?

Alice looked around wildly. It was a sterile room. The off-white panels were… were…

Something wasn't right.

On edge, she climbed to her feet. She was dressed in jeans and a cotton shirt. 2% polyester.

What the fuck happened?

That asshole shoved some kind of hood over her head and now… god her head was pounding. She couldn't fucking think straight.

Stumbling, she looked for an exit. There: there was a door, the same sterile off-white as everything else.

She crept over as quietly as she could, and turned the handle slowly. Her heart pounding, she cracked it open.

Silence.

She pushed it further, and as it swung open she saw the man, sitting at a fold-out table on a plastic chair.

A monster cape? He looked like a regular guy, if regular guys wore a skintight bodysuit. But his feet were kind of like hands, and he had vents on his head. Heat vents. Excess heat... His brain? Or just some bullshit mutation, that shit didn't have to make sense.

She refocused.

"Who the hell are you?"

"Your savior," he said, amusement clear in his voice.

"Not feeling very saved," she said, but despite herself she kept her tone lighter. He was right— not that she wouldn't have escaped on her own— and she had no idea who she was dealing with.

"Huh," he said. "Not the raving megalomaniac the media makes you out to be?"

"It's not megalomania if you're really that good," she retorted. "Besides, that shit was Lung's idea. I just played it through."

"Yes, all his idea, I'm sure," the man said. "Lung is currently in the Birdcage, so I hope you're capable of making _some_ decisions of your own."

"Fuck you!" she shouted. "I gave you points, because you didn't know I had shit under control, but if you're going to insult me then this is a waste of time."

"I see."

[Terminating simulspace. Resetting infomorph to: backup file 273. Scenario loading from backup file 273. Simulspace restarted. Connecting.]

— — —

"It's not megalomania if you're really that good," she retorted. "Besides, that shit was Lung's idea. I just played it through."

"Seems like a risky plan," the man said. "For you, I mean. Lung's in the Birdcage now, of course, but if he'd escaped… well, I wonder if you would have survived. No one could blame him for your actions while he was imprisoned, and if you weren't around to say different…"

"He wouldn't do that," she said, but she couldn't help but wonder. That contingency _had_ been very over the top. Lung's thorough education on power and fear—

" _I don't fear you," Bakuda said. Her pale blue eyes stared at Lung, unflinching._

" _You will," he answered her._

—had made it quite clear it was not her place to criticize. As much as she feared him, admired him, perhaps she forgot who he was. What he wanted. He sacrificed men every week for scraps of power. When planning against his own defeat… did she really expect him to pause over her?

"...I don't believe it," she said, but her voice wavered despite herself.

"He was going to dump your body in the river," he said bluntly, and she snapped.

"Fuck you and your bullshit! Maybe he was, but who the fuck are you? Just the next motherfucker wanting a piece of my genius ass, well you can just fuck—"

[Terminating simulspace. Resetting infomorph to: backup file 482-2. Scenario loading from backup file 482-2. Simulspace restarted. Connecting.]

— — —

When planning against his own defeat… did she really expect him to pause over her?

"...I don't believe it," she said, but her voice wavered despite herself.

"Perhaps he wouldn't have killed you," he said slowly. "But he wasn't looking out for you. It made sense to attach yourself to him, but he's gone now. You're a free agent… with no resources and a great deal of heat waiting for you."

"Uh huh," she said, smirking. "I see where this is going. You've seen my shit, and you _want_ some of this. Okay. I'll hear you out. Better make it good."

— — —

 **Welcome to the Parahumans Online Message Boards**

You are currently logged in, XxVoid_CowboyxX  
You are viewing:  
• Threads you have replied to  
• AND Threads that have new replies  
• OR private message conversations with new replies  
• Thread OP is displayed  
• Ten posts per page  
• Last ten messages in private message history  
• Threads and private messages are ordered by user custom preference.

 **Topic: Bad Canary is back_Nj5**

 **In: Boards**

 **JmqGAfl4UjbybmBe** (Original Poster)

Posted on May 12, 2011:

{OP replicated from mesh thread: [LINK] }

{OP replicated 37 times. Replies destroyed by thread deletions are not replicated back to PHO. Please direct censorship complaints to PHO administration.}

Hello! Bad Canary here.

As you all know, I was accused of attempted murder, aggravated assault with a parahuman ability, and sexual assault with a parahuman ability. Though I was acquitted on attempted murder, the jury found me guilty of the latter two charges.

There's a lot about the court case I could talk about. How I didn't get to pick my lawyer- allegedly hired on my behalf, but whatever- how they trussed me up in giant manacles, and a giant fucking gag mask, and then decided I couldn't even communicate with the lawyer through text. Not that it mattered when he barely responded before. Paraded me silently into the courtroom filthy and looking as deranged as possible, didn't defend me for crap, and they still couldn't get all the charges to stick.

But I don't see a point. The sketchy trial was as slanted as it gets, the media coverage was spinning like a top, and even the judge flat out said my sentence was more about making a statement to others than for anything I did. At least _that_ much is on record. Justice, right?

(Hint: Luckily, somebody didn't think so, or I'd be in the Birdcage right now. For life. With mass murderers and shit. What the fuck?)

But no. This isn't for the people who fell for the latest in a _long_ chain of manipulative bullshit directed at me, my label, whatever. It's for the fans.

I've got a new track for you, right here: [LINK]

For those reading this via PHO, my stuff is going to be hosted through a new thing. It's just called the mesh, apparently? You can access the forum parts through regular internet, but that's nothing. Only perk there is nobody can shut it down. A perk they've kindly extended to this post on PHO. Though I'd save a link to the mesh thread, people— I'm sure the PHO overlords will figure something out eventually.

What the real deal is, is virtual reality, guys. Like the Matrix, seriously, it's as real as real life. Except everybody gets to be Alexandria, yeah?

Only catch is, you need the VR headset. There's kind of a waiting list, backordered, whatever, but they've got a thing for anyone who makes content. Skip the line, and pass it on to your followers. Which is you all, I guess- I'm sorry that I can't get the list of followers off my old accounts, guys, I really am. I know this isn't enough for many of you, but they say the backorders will get filled, so...

First hundred replies, mesh or PHO, you get to skip the queue. Coming soon, I'm going to be performing live in the mesh, and I hope to see you there.

 **(Showing Page 2 of 6)**

► **XxVoid_CowboyxX**

Replied on May 12, 2011:

first

► **JmqGAfl4UjbybmBe**

Replied on May 12, 2011:

Invite #98 for VIP invite code BadCanary sent.

— — —

He hadn't _really_ believed it. He'd barely read the post, skimming down, and then he saw the VR stuff, and then he posted as fast as he could. For the first time in his life, he won something!

Sort of.

Another weird PHO account PMed him and he gave it his address, and then... nothing. He sent an angry reply, ranted in the thread (before it was deleted again), poked around the "mesh" forum— it was cool looking, sure, but whatever.

Went back to playing space opera.

And then the next day his mom said he had a weird package, and _holy shit_.

The headset helmet thing looked sci fi as fuck. It had some kind of crazy heavy docking station, he'd had to sit down after dragging the thing to his room. Breath for a minute.

Then, almost shaking, he put it on.

There was a stinging, and then…

...he was there.

Floating in the air, above Brockton Bay. Except when he looked down, there was no Boat Graveyard, or ruined buildings— everything looked amazing, and as soon as he thought about going closer his body _moved_. His _ripped_ body. He grabbed a railing and pulled, and it _bent_.

He'd dreamed about what it'd be like to be a cape. This wasn't like he imagined.

It was more. There weren't words for flying, or being super strong. He wondered if driving a racecar was like this, or maybe sex— stuff that couldn't be explained unless you'd done it. Felt it.

All he knew was… he couldn't give this up. He was done with space opera. His only regret was it was probably too late for GstringGirl to grab one of these…

...but she could still get on the waiting list, maybe? He had to tell her—

A pane appeared in front of him, and he recoiled, only to realize it was PHO. Like a hologram or something. But why not?

He quickly PMed GstringGirl, but before he could hit send, his message changed. A blurb about a special invite was appended.

Okay. Creepy.

But to be able to fucking fly? He could roll with it.

— — —

/AN: Funnily enough, she says it _was_ Lung's idea in canon.


	18. CH17 - Last Approach

CH17 - Last Approach

— — —

" _Arrogance is in everything I do. It is in my gestures, the harshness of my voice, in the glow of my gaze, in my sinewy, tormented face." - Coco Chanel_

" _Sometimes there is absolutely no difference at all between salvation and damnation." - Stephen King, The Green Mile_

— — —

Bakuda was a dangerous entity.

This wasn't just wordplay. There was something aberrant about her reactions. At first, I thought she was simply mentally ill— extreme insecurity, perhaps compounded by a manic-depressive illness? It was hard to say.

But as I probed her conversationally, anomalies became apparent. Looking at replays of her neural state, something stuck out. I checked the backups for Paige and Lisa, and cross-referenced the haphazard literature of Earth Bet. Checking Bakuda's ego again confirmed my hypothesis: the corona pollentia was aberrant, grossly over-expanded. Paige and Lisa had mostly distinct structures. In Bakuda, it merged outright into her cerebellum, a clear dividing line absent, and strange structures extended like tendrils through the rest of the brain, clouds of fine neural connections expanding out from the veins.

Examination of the continuous backup data showed that her sudden rages and mood shifts were directly preceded by bursts of neural activity originating in the heart of the corona pollentia.

In other words, her 'power' was the problem. If she was mentally ill before, she was obviously keeping it under enough control to attend a prestigious university. Now… well, she ended up on a truck to the Birdcage less than three months after triggering. Little more needed to be said.

But it was so deeply entangled with her brain…

Thinking, I dug into a special solarchive. There were certain materials frowned upon even, or perhaps especially, in the Love and Rage Collective. Things I refrained from sharing, even as I collected them all the same. The sanctity of the mind was both routinely violated and held as precious, after all— I didn't need that sort of polarizing attention.

I loaded a database of psychosurgical hacks, the sort people might apply to themselves.

[Listing first page: software antidepressant, stress limiter, motion sickness disabler, depersonalization/unity with universe, emotional sensitivity up/down, attentional focus control, VTA reward response, blood pressure control, sleep/awake state control, hunger control, thirst control, pain response control, flashbulb memory recording, sexual preference rewrite, diurnal rhythm reset trigger, amp/decrease love/kinship/friendship, wirehead, boredom reducer, freshness inducer, empathy toggle. 20 results per page. Page 1 of 204.]

I extracted the emotional sensitivity into a separate 'window', then opened a neuralware database. Rolodex face-recognition.

Another database. A general mental monitoring AI framework.

Another. Pathotronics: the deliberate, temporary inducement of strategically-useful mental disorders. Depressive realism.

A small data store buried under layers of encryption gave me Colorless Green, an cognitovirus AI designed to silently run within a victims very neurons, as a secret subsystem of the mind.

Directly, it wasn't appropriate. The very manifestation of powers toyed with human neurology; a counter implemented within the same neural network was asking for trouble. Furthermore, it suffered from the same issues as other hacks of its type: incompatibility with AGIs, nonhuman uplifts, and deviant mental architectures. Parahumans qualified as the latter.

Still a useful reference.

I pushed, and insight came. Whispers nudged me onto the right paths, and the code took shape. A ghostrider artificial intelligence. It would detect the aberrant mental states using fuzzy heuristics, trained from hundreds of simulspace interactions with Bakuda, pruned by Artemis. Not his specialization, but it didn't take great prowess to flag a time-frame as "insane behavior".

Upon detection of an aberrant impulse, her emotional sensitivity would be brutally clamped. Cyberware weaved through the brain tissue would snuff out the wave of neural activity, while weighting the mind towards a sense of fatal realism. Encouraging her to see things as they really were, not as she wished them to be. If these methods failed to halt the aberrant neurological impulses, direct interference methods cribbed from the Colorless Green cognitovirus came into play. She would become _incapable_ of considering me or my girls as enemies. In that moment, we would be unquestionably her greatest, most precious friends.

The same virus's Delusion module ensured any recognition of mental tampering was impossible. Any 'strange' behavior would be rationalized away. If it could even be called that Dangerous introspection was more… shut down, the signals down the neural pathways snuffed out before forbidden thoughts could reach coherence. Blanked out.

Any of this could also be controlled by the mental monitor AI, loaded with SIGINT drivers and instructed to watch for any evidence of dangerous activity, whether foolish tinkering or betrayal. It would silently deter, then deny...

...and if all else failed, shut her off.

In order to further protect against any possibility of subversion, I manufactured her a top-of-the-line Masked Steel synth. The synthetic masking was a realistic outer casing of faux-skin, carefully sculpted along with the underlying synth to conform to scans of Bakuda's previous body. The morph could cry, spit, have sex, and even bleed— a quick compilation of appropriate, dubious augmented reality software layers and the illusion was complete.

Even in the worst case, where someone openly _stated_ she was a robot, the words would never reach her mind. A mind simulated in pieces across multiple separate, immobile servers, several hundred meters underneath my warehouse. The servers and body connected only via qubit reservoirs. A dead man's switch connected to myself would trigger tanks of liquid thermite and activate disassemblers within the computing substrate. There were streaming backups, but it would _unquestionably_ shut her down until I chose to repair things.

For a moment, I thought I was being too paranoid.

Then I remembered her last bomb. Allegedly as powerful as a nuclear weapon. Made of nothing but household supplies.

I added another tweak, tripling mirror neurons related to empathy.

No. Not too paranoid.

— — —

"So the mesh thing seems to have PHO going crazy," Paige said. It was morning, three days since her "VIP codes" were expended, and I was simply laying in the bed, with her curled up against me.

"Yes," I said. "Between your thread and direct requests, 35% of my manufacturing capacity is just running off VR helmets. I've had to increase qubit production altogether."

"Well, they did manage to kill the thread," she responded. "Not that it matters. The topic of the mesh isn't banned and its trivial to pull the thread up from _there_. A mysterious VR tinker, they're calling you. Some are speculating about AI." She squeezed my side. "You better join the Protectorate before a gang snaps you up!"

"Ha."

"Have you looked at what people are making?"

"I haven't had the time," I said. "There's always more to do."

"You should. A bunch of people took inspiration from your tutorial spaces, and have been making copies of real cities and then improving them."

I grunted absently.

"Also Lisa said she wants your dick."

I turned and raised an eyebrow.

"Just checking if you were paying attention," she said, grinning.

"I'm just finishing an experiment," I said, saving the copy of Bakuda. "The base is done. There are several hundred resleeving cells across the coast at varying levels of completion, the mesh is expanding rapidly and if I allowed it, would consume all my manufacturing capacity."

I frowned. "Something is up with the seawater miners, though. I've started losing drones. Not a big deal, except each drone is towing several tons of fiber..."

"Boring," Paige pronounced. "You're as bad as Lisa. She just lays around playing with her muse and browsing the internet."

My mind flashed back to Lisa's revelation. I hadn't told Paige. Lisa was right— she would want to do something.

Troublesome, all of this.

Over a hundred mercenaries had been observed in combat with other gangs, in no small part due to the light from their tinkertech weaponry, and had been followed or indirectly tracked. Phones and home devices physically compromised by nanoswarms. Hideouts catalogued, payment sources added to an ever-growing picture of Coil's operation. Iterating up the links in the chains. It was slow, but the outcome was inevitable.

I considered the possibility of keeping Coil in a manner similar to Bakuda, but rejected it. His power was either an unreliable approximation, or forked thousands by definition— only to kill every fork when it was done. This wouldn't be a problem if it wasn't so indiscriminate. Since it was… his very existence cast an unpleasant shadow over life. Better to kill him and be done with it.

Barring some major shift in the next few days, I should be able to find him, and do exactly that.

"So I'm going to be adding someone new to our little group…"

— — —

"You've got to be fucking with me." Lisa stared at the motionless form of Alice Chua, commonly known as Bakuda.

"She's cute," Paige finally said. "Is that how she really looks? I wasn't really paying much attention in the Birdcage truck."

" _Who cares_ ," Lisa said. "He's going to use his 'resleeving' shit to make Bakuda a Terminator! You don't think this could go, I don't know, _horribly wrong_?"

"I trus—"

"She will only control the body," I said. "In reality, she will be in a box somewhere else, connected only by quantum entanglement. An AI is supervising her, and I've applied behavioral modifications—"

"Fucking ew." Lisa looked over at me, her face troubled. "You really creep me out sometimes Henry. If I didn't know better, I'd worry about you doing that shit to me." Despite her words, there was an edge of uncertainty in her voice.

"She is a mass murderer. And above anything else, demonstrably insane."

"Yeah. Sure." Lisa turned away, stepping up to the body. She touched the face. "It feels real."

"It is meant to be indistinguishable from a real human body, short of weight analysis or active scanning."

"...It's too much."

"What?"

"Everything. You can do too much," she said, talking faster. "I have trouble reading you, but tinker's can't do _this much_. Weapons, armor, vehicles, buildings, robot drones, mass production, no maintenance, biology, implants, cyberware, mind uploading, AI, virtual reality, simulations, perfect fucking human androids.… shit, you can do so many things I'm probably forgetting some stuff. Even Dragon can freely crib the work of other tinkers and she can't do everything you can." She turned back to me, her face serious. "You're impossible."

Paige turned away from the body, her face also curious.

I hesitated.

"I want to understand," Lisa said.

"Is this tinkertech?" I responded finally.

"What do you— no. It isn't? Which means you... aren't?"

"There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

"Yeah, okay, so you're supposed to be what, a super genius?"

"Yes, actually," I said shamelessly. Technically most transhumans were. Unfortunate intelligence and wisdom were not the same thing at all. Nor did greater aptitude for, say, math necessarily make you better with strategy or essays.

"You— you're fucking with me, stop it," Lisa said in frustration.

"If I were fucking with you, you'd know it," I retorted on automatic, and she flinched.

"I, um, yeah," she said, trailing off.

Paige laughed, and Lisa scowled at her.

"So when are you turning her on?" Paige asked.

"Now."

"What? Wait, no—"

The body jerked on the table, and Lisa scrambled away. Paige didn't move. Though her trust was real, the truth was I'd already went into everything with her before bringing Lisa in. She knew Alice wasn't capable of harming her.

Alice sat up, jerking her head around, eyes flicking wildly. She locked onto us and paused, then relaxed.

"Oh, so we're done?" she said.

"Yes," I replied. As far as she knew, she had just used a teleporter that reacted poorly to living things, knocking passengers unconscious.

"Okay," she said. She glanced at Paige and Lisa. "Seeing a theme here. Blonde your type?"

Lisa made a disgusted face. Paige just watched, face impassive.

"No," I said calmly. "I like all colors and sizes. But you aren't here for that."

She smirked. "Sure. So where am I setting up?"

"This way."

— — —

/AN: just some light mind control nothing to see here


End file.
